Novel #14 is now complete and published. The Norwall Pirates, softball team and liars club, take on an ancient undead Chinese wizard. All of it takes place in small Iowa farm towns during the Bicentennial summer of 1976. But some of the major players in this life-or-death struggle are immortal, and most of them are only high school freshmen, fifteen-years-old and still quite awkward in the face of a dangerous and arcane world full of the difficult problems of growing up.
The novel is called The Boy… Forever. Icarus Jones is a main character like Peter Pan, faced with the possibility of living forever, but never growing older than ten.
For now, I haven’t settled on the next one. But Number 14 is done.
One never knows what mysteries can be uncovered inside the bird house. The plot of the story depends on what happens next in the picture.Details make the real story clear.Pictures tell a story even if the story-teller falls asleep in the process.A picture can spin a fairy-tale even if it doesn’t show a plot. Pictures easily establish a setting.Pictures can allude to many, many other things.
I am, however, an expert on how NOT to write a good poem.
A truly terrible poem might begin with an over-extended metaphor.
It might begin by saying, “A poem is like a fairy tale, filmed in black and white on 35 mm film stock, with Orson Wells as the director.”
And for the meat of the poem, you use details about the fairy acrobats having an accident on the trapeze, and the circus train derails and has a terrible accident, and the clown never takes his makeup off because he’s on the run from the police… and you totally forget that the movie “The Greatest Show on Earth” was directed by Cecil B. DeMille and filmed in color.
And you have a tendency to “squinch” the rhymes, rhyming “good” with “food” and “dud” with “odd,” and at the same time you put trochaic warts all over the iambic pentameter because as a poet you are not William Shakespeare, and you are not even Buddy Rich because the rhythm sounds more like banging trashcan lids than drumbeats.
In the middle of the poem somewhere it suddenly becomes free verse without a rhyme scheme or reason for the change. And the theme circles back on itself and does a pretzel twist with no logic to salt it with.
And you are a terrible poet like Mickey because, when you write a poem you don’t realize;
the gemstone at the center of your poem must go from your mind, to pen, to paper, to eye of the reader, to mind… and finally to heart…
And the blaze of its beauty must be strong enough to resonate…
and be able to SHAKE THE BONES OF THE UNIVERSE.
And you can’t do it because you don’t even get the irony of that rule.
Children, especially young children, are natural nudists. So it seems to me, who was once a child and remembers being one, once dealt with sisters and cousins, once worked at a daycare center with children below the age of five, spent 24 years teaching middle school students, mostly 7th graders, raised two boys and one girl of my own, and for a few years had a backyard pool fenced in for skinny-dipping. Every child I ever knew went through a period of liking to go naked. (Though I have to admit that I never saw a middle-school student naked, nor would I ever want to, but only know about their nudist ways from talking to them and reading their journals where they often talked about things so personal it shocked me a bit and made me wish to un-know it.)
During my own preschool days, I loved taking a bath, especially with Mr. Bubble or other bubble-bath soap in the tub with me. I liked the feel of it all over my naked self. It was a sensual experience that I reveled in. But one time at Grandma Beyer’s house my nudist’s enthusiasm got curbed after bath time was over. I went out into the living room naked without my pajamas. My Grandma Beyer knew how to say, “No,” to children. But she had never threatened corporal punishment until that time.
“Put your clothes on, or Grandma will spank you,” she said. And that is all she said. She used that old farm-wife voice that promised painful hyde removal if I offered any defiance. She had never threatened me with discipline before, that I could remember, And she never did again that I know of. Nor did she have to. The message was conveyed. And from that moment on, I was led to understand that enjoying a state of personal nakedness was only the most private of things. If that had not happened when it did, then I think I would have been a lot less shy about nakedness as I grew.
And then there was the time when I was routinely being babysat after school at my Uncle Larry’s farm along with my two sisters and my baby brother while Mom worked as a nurse on the 3 to 11 shift. Dad didn’t get home until 6. I was probably 8.
Uncle Larry had a barn. And I was allowed to play alone in there as long as I stayed away from the hogs who could be dangerous and didn’t get cow poop on myself. The hay loft was a wonderful place to get naked and play around, jumping from the top of a high stack of bales into the pile of scattered hay below. The straw was always rather scratchy and unpleasant if you plunged into it butt first, but the thrill of flying and spinning through the air naked was glorious.
But, the clan on my mother’s side of the family was made up of mostly girl cousins, there being seven of them between me, the eldest cousin, and the other two boys, one of whom was my baby brother. And girls, especially evil cousin-type girls, glory in embarrassing boy cousins. My sister and the oldest of Uncle Larry’s girls caught me with no clothes on in the hay loft one day. I scrambled and dressed myself faster than I ever had dressed myself before. My face changed colors in ways I had never done before either. And both of the girls tried to further embarrass me by pulling down pants and underpants to show off their girl parts. I hid my face and pretended not to look. But I also learned that I liked naked girls that day. I did sneak a few peeks. It was, of course, a couple of years before my friend Wilford told me the facts of life (though that probably didn’t matter since most of what Wilford revealed to me was totally false information.)
It occurs to me now, 58 years later, that it probably would’ve been better to get the real facts from my Mom, the registered nurse, or from my Dad before this all happened. We could’ve maybe innocently played naked in the hay together knowing full well what not to do and what was really bad in that situation. But as an innocent child, curious but clueless, all I could do was fumble about and worry that I would burn in Hell for doing what I was told was wrong, but I really enjoyed doing. (My Mom could’ve told me the facts of life, but she assumed it was my father’s place to do that. And Dad thought Mom would take care of it since she had the medical training. That’s my excuse for being ignorant, and I’m sticking to it.)
Looking back on it now, with the full knowledge of a well-read adult, I think it is a fact that children have a natural affinity for nudism. And like the many other things like creativity and wonder that we train out of them before they reach puberty, maybe we should be encouraging it instead.
Now that I have offended you and made you swear off my blog forever, let me remind you. This is a humor blog. But that doesn’t mean I don’t really believe some pretty crazy stuff.
One might wonder why I am thinking about nudity so much. And I suppose if I am going to devote a book of essays to the obsession, then I should probably explain why I am so obsessed and why I am trying to actually be a nudist. Of course, you will probably laugh about it when I get to the real reason. At least I hope it’s a matter of laughter and not pitchforks and torches.
You can probably trace the nudist thing in this blog to the publishing of my YA novel, Recipes for Gingerbread Children. In that book, there is a pair of twin sisters, Sherry and Shelly Cobble, who are nudists, come from a family that practices nudism at home, and are beloved child friends to the main character, Gretel Stein, the old woman who survived the Holocaust and had once been a nudist herself, before Auschwitz.
This was not the first book I published, nor, in my opinion, the best book I had written and published to that point. But it was the first book to become popular among a special classification of book lovers. I mean nudist and naturist writers of fiction. One of them read and loved the book, becoming an advocate for it, and inviting me to become a part of their writer’s group. That advocate has many wonderful nudist-centered stories available on Amazon under his pen name, Ted Bun. I recommend that you check out his work if you have the least bit of interest in living life without clothes on all the time.
Bobby and me ready for skinnydipping.
The obsession does go all the way back to childhood, however. I was a child innocently fascinated by nature and what it felt like to be immersed in it with little or no clothing on. I lived at a time when bathing suits only covered the part of me below the belly button down to barely below the crotch. And I was fascinated on Friday nights by the nearly naked body of Tarzan Ron Ely and his boy sidekick Jai as they swung on vines through the African jungle. And I will have skinny-dipping stories to share later in the book as well. I liked to go to the Bingham Park Woods south of town and ride my bicycle naked up and down the park pathways. I loved the feeling of being naked outdoors.
That innocent love was tragically suspended by a traumatic thing that happened to me at the age of ten that I will have to talk about in this book. And it will not be any easier to read than it will be for me to write about it. But nudism and naturism have a strong enough attraction for me that it eventually helped me overcome the trauma. Nudity has been a good thing for me throughout my life, even during that period that I felt it was bad for me. And I will have to do a lot of explaining about that.
And so, in this introductory excuse-making and rationalizing essay, I finally come to the real reason I need to write this book. I decided that, when I retired from teaching, I would choose to do at least one thing that truly terrified me, but would help make my life complete. Skydiving, flying an airplane, and bungee jumping was all beyond what I had the power and monetary resources to do. So, in 2017, I agreed to write an article for the True Nudists website about trying nudism for the first time. I then arranged to make a first-time visit to Bluebonnet Nudist Park in Alvord, Texas. And I will be writing about how I carried out that evil plan in this book as well.
Stanley Menschen was a simple man, believing firmly in the right and wrong of many things. He believed in police procedures. He still believed in them now that he was no longer a member of the Dallas Police Department and was doing freelance investigative work instead. That’s why he didn’t participate in the initial investigation of Yesenia Montemayor’s disappearance. You needed to let the police do their jobs.
“Stan, you know she most likely ran away and threw down the underwear with the blood on it to get talked about as she hid out with friends somewhere.”
Stan leaned over the desk and looked Officer Jason Penny in the eyes. “J.C, tell me you don’t think the boy isn’t worth investigating because he’s doing the same thing?”
“He was her boyfriend. The connection is obvious.”
“So, the bloody underwear thing was a pre-planned throw-down? They plotted it out together?”
“What else?”
“That’s what I want to know. Any other clues that don’t indicate a simple runaway?”
“The detectives didn’t turn anything up.”
“Did you seriously investigate the store owner?”
“You mean the creepy guy? Old Eule Geist? You know he’s your stepdaughter’s alibi, don’t you?”
“Yes, but that shop has been investigated for years. What other current investigations involve that damned toy store?”
“Just a couple. The mysterious case of a woman dropping into a coma inside the store. Name of Brittany Nguyen. Currently in Parkland Hospital’s Long-Term Care Unit.”
“A prior medical condition?”
“Not that we can prove. But how would Geist have…”
“You know the toy store is owned by some guy named Mephisto? Has been for over a hundred years.”
“Same guy?”
“Same name on all the paperwork. Probably a Junior and a Third, though the documents don’t say that.”
“No way any of them poisoned the lady. Especially not the dead ones.”
Stan scribbled the name of the coma lady down in his notebook. “And the other cases?”
“Couple of runaway grade school kids. Eight years old. Shandra Johnson, age eight, and Mark Merriweather, also age eight. The boy’s bicycle was found near the toy store. But the girl’s old man is a prime suspect. He’s been on our radar for wife beating and child abuse for quite some time.”
Stan noted that down too.
“Anything else?”
“Your girl’s case.”
“Yeah. At least it is something to start with.”
“There’s nothing there, Stan. Really. It’s all coincidence and rumors about a place we all said was haunted when we were kids. Nothing there, I tell you.”
Stan nodded. Nothing on the surface. But a lot of dark and deep water to dive into. You never prejudge anything… at least, not if you’re wise.
The secret to this essay is that the title is a pun. And yes, I know you probably don’t find it very punny. But I wanted to talk about the difficulties of portraying the difficulties of communication in a talk-a-lot-sometimes-talk-too-much world.
Yes, my current work in progress, Fools and their Toys, is about a man who can hardly talk at all because of undiagnosed autism who suddenly, miraculously finds a voice through ventriloquism, and then finds himself needing to communicate to a boy who is deaf and only speaks sign language and another boy who is profoundly distracted with ADD and bipolar disorder. He needs to communicate desperately because he knows things that have been locked up in his head for years that may help the FBI stop a cereal killer. No, that is a pun again. Shame on me. The murderer commits multiple murders of young boys, not breakfast food
Danny O’Day… not mine, but very much like mine.
I chose to write this rather insane novel about how not to communicate with real people because I, myself, as a kid was given to all kinds of communication theatrics and tricks of entertainment. I was also a shy kid after the age of ten for very sinister reasons.
It is important to realize that you absolutely have to communicate with others in life. Even if something is preventing you, like my own bout of self-loathing brought on by a sexual assault committed against me by an older boy. I got a ventriloquist’s dummy for Christmas near the time of the terrible event. It was Danny O’Day from the Montgomery Ward’s Christmas catalog. I taught myself to do ventriloquism. And then I gave it up when I realized the puppet would say things I didn’t want anyone to hear.
Edgar Bergen, Charlie McCarthy, and Mortimer Snerd
Never the less, I continued to be fascinated life-long with ventriloquists and the little people they created.
Edgar Bergen was often in movies on TV during the Saturday afternoon matinee on Channel 3. I often saw his lips move. I was actually a better mouth-still ventriloquist than the old master.
Jerry Mahoney, Paul Winchell, and Knucklehead Smiff
Paul Winchell used to have a TV show in the 50’s which I saw on re-runs as a boy in the 60’s. He was also the voice of Tigger, Dick Dastardly, and Gargamel. (If you don’t recognize any of those cartoon characters, I mourn for your inadequately-filled childhood.)
Shari Lewis, Lambchop, and Charlie Horse
And, of course, I was fascinated and enthralled by Shari Lewis and Lambchop any time they were on TV, especially Sunday nights with Ed Sullivan.
Learning about ventriloquism never solved any problems for me. But it gave me a way to talk to myself that simulated having real friends. It helped me survive the dark years of being a teenager.
It is, of course, Jeff Dunham who fascinates me now.
Ventriloquism, humor, made-up characters, and the ability to talk with them is what I am chiefly concerned with now. My life and my current novel is taken up with talking, though not the normal talking of normal people. Talking with the voices that come from strange locked trunks inside you, the secrets you always meant to keep, but sooner or later have to be said out loud by someone. And maybe that someone is a dummy.
I intend to write a book of essays about naturism and nudism, my attempts as a teacher to avoid becoming a practitioner while still teaching, and my eventual yielding to the urge to become what I avoided becoming for too long.
Now I know from my own family and my various communities over the years that nudists and naturists are generally considered to be a category of crazy people. That was especially a pointed observation in Iowa during the winter time when I was a boy in the 60s.
Of course, it was the 60s. And even though the hippies and other allegedly naked crazy people lived in far-away California and far-away New York, and closer, but still far-away Chicago, there were people we all gossiped about that would gad about their house in the all-together. Apparently, we knew because somebody, probably an old-lady gossip gatherer, had been looking through somebody else’s back windows. And some of those local crazy people turned out to be ordinary farmers, bankers, and even members of the Belle City town council. Really, the councilman and his wife are the reason I am calling the town by the fictionalized version of its name. Not because I am trying to protect the people’s identities, which you can figure out with very limited research, but because the old-lady gossip gatherer may have fictionalized what she allegedly saw through their back window and talked about at morning coffee in the Uptown Cafe.
But you see me here in a drawing of myself as a nude boy because from very early on in life, I felt the urge to give myself the freedom of costume… or lack thereof… as the councilman and his wife obviously gave to themselves in the privacy of their own home.
I was a big fan of skinny-dipping, and spending alone time nude in the woods south of town and the tree-lined pastures down by the creek to the west of town. I enjoyed being naked, although I dreaded the Devil finding out what I had already told Jesus in private, and then being condemned to Hell to burn for eternity… although, according to the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch in the Encyclopedia Britannica at school, I would still get to be naked.
This, then, will be a book both humorous and potentially sad about naked people and why naked can be good. I will include in this book works of art that I have made portraying people who are intentionally naked and happy about it. So, if your eyeballs will catch on fire for seeing naked people in artwork, your eyeballs should already be producing prodigious amounts of smoke, if not open flames. You better stop looking before you are blind. Some people’s Old Testament God is obviously much crankier than the God Jesus told me about when I talked to him in private.
I do intend to make fun of people who like to be nude in this book. But I will also make fun of myself for being one of those people. And I don’t intend to spare people who wear clothes all the time from a little bit of satire either. (Really, Mrs. Simms? You made Richard wear a swimsuit in the bathtub until he was twenty?)
One really weird thing that teachers do is think about thinking. I mean, how can a person actually teach someone else how to think and how to learn if they don’t themselves understand the underlying processes? Now that I have retired from teaching and spend all my time feeling sorry for myself, I thought I would try thinking about thinking one more time at least. Hey, just because I am retired, it doesn’t mean I can’t still do some of the weird things I used to do as a teacher, right?
This time I made a map to aid me in my quest to follow the twists and turns of how Mickey thinks and how Mickey learns. Don’t worry, though. I didn’t actually cut Mickey’s head in half to be able to make this map. I used the magical tool of imagination. Some folks might call it story-telling… or bald-face lying.
Now, a brain surgeon would be concerned that my brain maps out in boxes. He would identify it as a seriously deformed brain. It is not supposed to be all rectangular spaces and stairs. It probably indicates a severe medical need for corrective surgery… or possibly complete amputation. But we are not going to concern ourselves with trying to save Mickey from himself right now. That is far too complex a topic to tackle in a 500-word daily post. We are just discussing the basics of operation.
You see the three little guys in the control room? They are an indication that not only did I steal an idea from the Disney/Pixar Movie Inside Out, but I apparently have too few guys doing the job up there compared to the movie version. (It probably makes sense though that a young girl like the one in the movie has a much more sensible configuration in her brain than someone who was a middle school teacher for 24 years. Seriously, that job can do a bit of damage.) The three little guys are not actually Moe, Curly, and Larry, though that wouldn’t be far from descriptive accuracy. They are Impulsive Ignatz, currently in the driver’s seat (or else I wouldn’t be writing this), Proper Percy the Planner, and Pompositous Felixian Checkerbob, the fact-checker and perfectionist (also labeled the inner nerd… I am told not everyone has one of these). They are the three little guys that run around in frantic circles in my head trying to deal with a constant flow of input and output, trying to make sense of everything, and routinely failing miserably.
I shouldn’t forget the other two little guys in my head, Sleepytime Tim in the Dream Center, and little Batty up in the attic. I have no earthly idea how either of them function, or what in the heck they are supposed to do. But there they are. The other three run up and down stairs all day, locating magic mushrooms and random knowledge in the many file cabinets, record collections, book stacks, and odd greasy containers that are stored all around in the many nooks and crannies of Mickey’s mind. They collect stuff through the eyes and ears, and it is also their responsibility to chuck things out through the stupidity broadcaster at various inopportune times. It is also a good idea for them to avoid the lizard brain of the limbic system in the basement. It is easily angered and might eat them.
So now you should be able to fully understand how Mickey thinks. (Or not… a qualifier I was forced to put in by Checkerbob.)
I gave you a list of places where my ideas for fiction come from, and in the end, I failed to explain the thing about the bottle imp. Yes, I do get ideas from the bottle imp. He’s an angry blue boggart with limited spell powers. But he’s also more than 700 years old and has only been trapped in the bottle since 1805. So, he has about 500 years of magical life experience to draw from and answer my idea questions. Admittedly it would be more helpful if he were a smarter imp. His name is Bruce, and his IQ in human terms would only be about 75. But, then, I don’t have to worry about misfired magic. If I asked him to, “Make me a hamburger,” he wouldn’t immediately change me into a fried, ground-beef patty because he is not smart enough to do that high of a level of magic spell.
But he is just barely intelligent enough to tell me a truthful answer if I asked him a question like, “What would happen if I put an alligator’s egg in a robin’s nest as a joke, and the robin family decided it was their own weird-looking egg and then tried to hatch it?” The answer would be truthful according to his vast knowledge of swamp pranks. And it would also be funny because he’s too dumb to know better. In fact, he told me about a mother robin who worked so diligently at hatching an alligator egg that a baby alligator was hatched. She convinced it that it was actually a bird. And when it came time for the baby birds to learn to fly, the baby alligator couldn’t do it… until she talked it into flapping madly with all four legs. Then, a mother’s love and faith in her child got an alligator airborne.
Yeah, that hasn’t proved to be a very useful story idea. I put it into a story I was writing during my seven years in high school, and then lost the manuscript. (I was a teacher, not a hard-to-graduate student.) But it was proof that you can get your writing ideas from a bottle imp.
So, if you decide to use bottle imps as an idea source for fiction, the next step is to find and acquire the right sort of bottle imp. I got mine from Smellbone, the rat-faced necromancer. I bought it for an American quarter and three Canadian loonies more than a dozen years ago. I found it at his Arcana and Horse-Radish Burger Emporium in Montreal. But I am not sure how that information helps you. Smellbone died in a firey magical-transformation accident involving an angry Wall-Street financier and a dill pickle. The whole Emporium went to cinders in an hour.
If you are going to try to capture the bottle imp yourself, which I strongly do not recommend, you are going to need a magical spell-resistant butterfly net, a solid glass jar, bottle, or brass urn. A garlic-soaked cork to fit the bottle. A spell scroll ready to cast containing at least one fairy-shrink spell. And an extremely limited amount of time to actually think about what you are doing.
Now I have told you how I get writing ideas from a bottle imp. Aren’t you glad I did not include this idea in the post about where ideas come from? After all, I am a fiction writer. I get my jollies from telling lies in story form. And bottle imps, especially angry blue bottle imps named Bruce, or Charlie, or Bill, are more trouble than they are worth. They can curse you with magical spells of infinite silliness and undercut your serious nature for a lifetime.
Catch a Falling Star 