MAGA Man
The cartoon portrait exaggerates and calls attention to things that are not ordinarily something to be proud of. MAGA Man’s defiance, Doofy Fuddbugg’s toothless grin, or Dorothy’s threatening presence can all make us laugh and enjoy the funny thing that no one else can give us.
Crazy Catnip is here to put an end to this.
Sometimes it seems the stars are simply set against us. But the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars.
It was in a pothole in Scott Mill Road, actually. We hit it at thirty miles an hour near the roped-off road construction as we were going to the CVS to pick up my glaucoma eye drops. I immediately thought we had probably popped a tire, as we did on monster-canyon in a Dallas street a few years ago. But no warning lights were on. And later inspection showed no visible damage.
Still, the next week saw a check-engine light coming on and then going off again… And a few days later the engine began coughing and spitting like a fat man having a heart attack. I had to wait for Monday for the Five Star Ford service department to be open. But Monday I got ill during the weather change and the onset of intermittent rain. So, Tuesday, I barely got the car started, and we limped down to the service center, the car chugging and farting all the way.
So, we get there and immediately find out that the service department was already booked well into October. And the car was too dead to get it anywhere else.
Dang! What lovely bad luck!
And I am going to absolutely need a car at the very least a half-dozen times in the next week. The Princess has to get to the junior college campus in Richardson a couple of times. We need to get to the store and back enough not to starve. And my wife gets back from a wedding in the Philippines on September 12th. She will then need a car of her own too.
I can’t get by for two months without a vehicle of some kind. And getting a new car before the old one can even be looked at is tricky at best.
But I have navigated worse setbacks in my 65+ years on this planet. I don’t actually remember how it was on the planet before this one. I am fairly certain, though, that there is a way to get across this crevice in the rugged path of life.
Filed under autobiography, feeling sorry for myself, humor, Paffooney
Canto 146 – Robo-Alliances
Smoky Hardretter was adding the final touches to the image on the 3-D display of a Mechanoid-control device. It was essential that they get things right. If they were going to establish control over the planet Mingo, Smoky and his ally Raylond King, two thirds of the ruling triumvirate of the local star cluster, would have to develop a stronger Mechanoid army than the one already controlled by the third triumvir, Evil Emperor Mong the Maniacal.
“Ray, what are we going to do if we can’t overcome Mong’s superior control mechanisms?”
The handsome young Raylond and his beautiful young wife, Tara Salongi, stepped in from the nursery.
“We just got little Amanda to sleep, Smoky. You have to discuss quietly.” Tara’s stern look gave him no room to raise his voice in protest.
“Mong is such a weak-willed ruler. There has to be a way to overcome his advantage.” Ray’s jaw was set in a grim line.
“You haven’t really taken him on directly, Ray. He’s tougher in conflict than he seems when he’s drinking coffee or participating in the mechanical-dance ritual. And he was the one out of the three of us responsible for the defenses of the entire star cluster.”
“Oh, I am aware of that. And it only got worse when we tried to force him to join the New Star League with us. He went directly to Sir Saurol to report us and get Admiral Tang to replace and recall us.”
“Um, guys…” Tara indicated the man-shaped thing listening to their conversation while leaning against the door post.
“Interesting… I seem to be here at just the right time to hear exactly what I needed to hear.”
“Who are you? And what do you want?” Smoky asked.
“He’s the synthezoid robot known as Sorcerer. He’s a bad guy, and you need to shoot him in the head before he can do his robot thing.” Tara was glaring commandingly again.
“Wait! I’m not the early model. I’m Sorcerer 27. New and improved. And I’m the solution to the problem you were just talking about.”
“You want to help us revolt against the Imperium?” asked Raylond.
“I’m tired of being shot in the head before I can perform my miraculous functions. I need to be on the winning side for a change.”
“What can you do for us?” asked Tara suspiciously.
“I possess access to Syn Corporation AI control systems. I can turn your Rot Warrior Zombie Soldiers into reanimated beings who can think creatively and independently, even as well as they did when they were living beings.”
“Why would you help us?” asked Smoky.
“You will reward me with sole control of the planet Zadukar that orbits the Lonely Star in the far corner of the cluster.”
“That miserable hot rock with methane for an atmosphere?” asked Raylond.
“You have a deal!” declared Smoky.
“Yes, but the prince is probably long dead. And, besides, Slythinus himself was probably killed on Stanley,” said Sorcerer.
“Why do you want it?” asked Raylond.
“I just want to be a ruler among the good guys for once,” he said with an evil robotic smile.
Filed under aliens, humor, novel, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, science fiction
Every day has its own badness.
Enough to sour the milk.
But if you put your rollerskates on,
Wool sweaters start to feel like silk.
And the rolling life goes up and down,
And you’ll probably have some spills,
But do not take the rollerskates off…
It’s worth it for the thrills.
**Please note** This is a fiction story. It absolutely did not happen in real life. So, no real-life school administrators should be fired over it. And the author is a RETIRED school teacher, so it is not necessary to hire a hit man to protect future students from evil ideas like the ones presented in this story.
Rudy was miserable as he sat in the counselor’s office staring at the note from his teacher. Miss Nactarine. the sympathetic young counselor, sat behind her desk praying silently that the poor boy would be able to overcome his extreme shyness for long enough to explain what the problem really was.
“Well, um… you see, Miss…. I, uh…”
And then, once again, he simply stopped talking. She waited for several minutes.
“Rudy, just take a deep breath and let it all come out. You were sent here for sleeping in class. Tell me why that happened.”
“Okay, Miss. I been having bad dreams.”
“Oh? They’ve been keeping you from sleeping at night? What are the bad dreams about?”
“Um, well… In my dreams, I keep forgetting to put my clothes on before coming to school. I end up having to give a speech in Miss Burkett’s class standing naked in front of everybody. And the girls were laughing.”
“Oh, I see. Hmm. And what do you suppose is causing these dreams?”
He didn’t hesitate even for a moment. “P.E. Class!”
“Why P.E. Class?”
“Well, because… when it’s over, sixth graders have to take a shower. You have to get naked and go into the shower room where everybody can see.”
“But there are only other boys in there.” She knew as soon as she said it why that didn’t matter to Rudy. Even as she said it, she could see this shrinking-violet child trying to disappear in his chair.
“What do you think we should do about this problem?” She was thinking swim-suit for showers or something.
“Can we cancel P.E. Class?”
“Honey, that’s State-mandated curriculum. You can’t pass to the seventh grade without taking that class.”
“Can we cancel showers?”
“Young men in the sixth grade begin to have body odor. You know how that smell would affect learning?”
Rudy was dissolving in front of her.
“You are a vary brave young man. The best way to overcome this problem is to simply make up your mind not to let it affect you. The next time you have to take a shower, just face your fears head on. Take your clothes off and act like you want everybody to see you naked. Once you have endured the worst that can happen, you won’t have that bad dream anymore. You will know that you can do anything by being brave enough to try.”
Miraculously, Rudy seemed to brighten up, as if he had finally come to terms with the problem.
“Thanks, Miss. That helps a lot.”
As she dismissed him back to class, she couldn’t help but congratulate herself on saying the right thing at the right time.
The next morning, as students who walked to school from the neighborhood gathered in front of the school, Rudy showed up striding purposefully towards the front door wearing only a hat.
Most of the girls squealed in response, and then broke out into laughing conversations.
One of the most popular seventh-grade cheerleaders said loudly enough for everyone to hear, “I think he looks really cute like that! I wish all the boys were brave enough to come to school like that.”
“We would if all the girls did too!” hollored some invisible boy from somewhere in the back of the crowd.
Principal Eirohnee quickly brought both naked Rudy and Counselor Nacterine into her office.
Rudy was very comfortably nude as he stood in front of the principal’s desk and explained.
“It really cured my problem,” Rudy said. “From the time I made up my mind to do this I have felt nothing but confidence. If I can come to school naked, I can do anything!”
“Intend to go to all your classes today naked, do you?” asked the Principal.
“Yes, if you let me. If you don’t, it was still worth it.”
Full of pride for her part in Rudy’s transformation, the Counselor said, “I think we should allow it.”
“Well, isn’t that precious. Why don’t we just change the dress code for the day and have everybody go to school today naked?”
“I’d be willing to try that,” Miss Nacterine said.
**Author’s note** You could argue that the Counselor was fired for not understanding what sarcasm was, but, more likely, it was because of how the majority of the students showed up the following day.
What you see is basically me.
It is said by somebody who wasn’t basically me that any time an artist draws a picture of someone, or paints a picture of someone, or twizzles a twizzle-snoot of someone… they are basically making a picture of themselves.
So, this Paffooney that I paffooned of a purple mouse in a Don Martin-esque style, is supposed to be Mickey the cartoonist. And Mickey is supposedly, basically me.
And here I am as Muck Man, the superhero. It is me because the super power he has is his horrible, non-adorable, and unrelenting stench. The horrible smell of him renders villains and bad people unconscious or worse… sometimes straight to the hearse. And using his olfactory assaults on evil as a way to make something terrible into something with a -someness of awe, makes him indubitably, indelibly basically me.
And here is a picture of a boy who might’ve been my son if only I had been given enough good sense to fall in love with that first blond young lady who first had thoughts about making babies with me. I didn’t. I’m stupid. And now she has only girls. That makes it a picture too of basically me.
And this little not-me was me all along, and as the boy who sees colors, it’s really not wrong. Synesthetic they call it in a name that’s not long, but is resoundingly deep like the words of a song.
And you might argue this one and say that it’s true… “This one is too pretty to be a picture of you.” But you would be wrong on this basis, you see…
The monster inside me is basically me
And here I am all magic and purple, and I just blew the rhyme again, so this isn’t another danged verse. I drew this picture of Milt Morgan from an old school picture of me.
I often say the character in the stories is based on the Other Mike, the other boy I grew up with who was named Mike in my little home town.
But he thought like me, he acted a lot like me. He even looked like me, at least a little bit. So, if I am portraying him, I am depicting basically me.
And this is the naked me, as a nudist back in childhood in Rowan, Iowa, which I never was… not like this… but still am. Because I am a writer. And writers always write about their naked selves, showing the whole world what saner and more prudish people keep secret. If they were truly smart and wanted to keep their secrets to themselves, artists would never draw or paint or write about or twizzle about themselves. In fact, they would make no art at all.
Filed under artwork, autobiography, humor, Paffooney
Filed under art editing, artwork, colored pencil, Paffooney, self portrait, studio
The most obvious aid that naturism has been to me as an author is how readily members of the online naturist/nudist community are willing to spread the word when my writings include things that they care about. They are much better at caring about my work, especially the parts of it that touch on naturism/nudism, than other portions of the online #writingcommunity is about any of my other work
The website I linked to twice above is a good example. (You might need a Spanish/English dictionary if you don’t normally read the English parts easily.) I have had summer boosts to views here on WordPress two Augusts in a row now due to naturists coming across my posts and linking to them so that their own followers can share in discovering me as an author who is friendly to naturism. My continued online contact with other naturists/nudists on Twitter continues to benefit me in book sales, exchanges of writing tips and tricks, and exposure to the good naturist literature, both fiction and non-fiction, that is out there.
Here are some of the authors who’ve had the most impact on me,
Ted Bun (his pen name) first discovered my nudist characters in Recipes for Gingerbread Children. He did the most to get me involved with other nudist-friendly authors. And his book The Boy On a Baker’s Bike is possibly his best story, out of many excellent ones, because of how much the main character reflects some of my own experiences with being nude around other nude people.
Will Forest edited the book Holiday in the Nudist Colony in which I was encouraged to add a story of my own. His book Co-Ed Naked Philosophy is a wonderful fictional story that works like an encyclopedia of the philosophies behind naturism, the practices of naturism, and the struggle of those actively trying to make the practice of it normalized. I am half-way through the book and finding it an absolutely enthralling story. I am definitely going to read more of his books.
Paul Z. Walker is one of the organizers of the group of naturist-fiction writers that I have become a part of. He also writes a variety of fiction with nude characters in it. I haven’t read any of his books yet, but I own some of them in e-book format and will correct that problem soon.
Of course, the biggest benefits I have gotten from naturism/nudism is not from merely observing it while clothed, but by participating and getting naked, despite the fears brought on by childhood trauma and the general disdain the public at large has for nudity.
It has made me whole again to be a practicing nudist. It has helped me heal and overcome self-hatred. It has helped me overcome depression. It has also helped me understand the kind of honesty and innocence that life requires of us. Nothing bad remains hidden forever, and sunlight heals many moral problems that were festering before being exposed.
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The most critical thing I learned about naturism and living life naked is that is not about porn or sex. You can see from the drawings I have put in this post that none of the pictures are sexual in content or in any way essentially erotic.. They are merely naked and happy. That is how life should be. At least, in my humble opinion. And I will continue to write stories about it.
Since I have so far miraculously survived the 2020 pandemic, I have nothing better to do then to relate the whiff-a-typical story of the world’s smelliest superhero as he makes his semi-triumphant return to the public eye… like a horrific mud-ball to the face.
If you recall the newspaper accounts of mild-mannered reporter Dark Bent, or even if you don’t, we recall that Muck Man was put into a community-imposed exile until such time as he would actually take a bath with soap and water. Being unable to find soap and water that was even willing to get within a quarter mile of him, MM started with sand baths in Death Valley until he was finally able to sand-blast away the outer hard crust of his personal odor.
You need to remember too at this point that MM’s super power is olfactory based. He alone among heroes had a personal stench so powerful that criminals would swoon into a coma at the mere mention of his name.
But after significant sand-baths, and once that horrific outer layer was gone, the water spirits were unable to determine who MM really was, and so allowed him to bathe in Lake Michigan where the water’s own funkiness managed to partly hide MM’s rancid smell. His super-scent finally hidden in the folds of Lake Michigan’s highly-polluted, almost water-like contents, MM’s country-encompassing foulness no longer was detectable to MM’s arch-nemesis.
Meanwhile the nefarious villain known as the absolute pinnacle of oleaginous corruption, the Monkey King, had hidden his swamp-monstery monsterness in the swamps of Washington D. C. where they were barely discernible in the midst of swamp gas and elephant ideas. His plan to take over the USA was going swimmingly. The Pachyderm Party was uniformly aligned behind him ready to blanket the countryside with toxic elephant poo. And, believing that if they could hold onto power long enough for elephant poo to fossilize into stone, they planned to dominate everything forever.
So, in secret, in his newly smell-reduced Muck Lair, Muck Man began planning the greatest stink-assault ever launched.
“But wait just a second, Dad!” cried Muck Lad. “You will be defeated again if you don’t come to the realization that your super-power and his super-villain’s power are really the same power. You can’t fight stink with stink.”
“Well, then, how do you defeat a super-evil super-villain with super-stink power coming out of his mouth directly from his very good brain?”
“Well…” said Muck Woman (who insists she is Muck Woman, NOT Muck Girl, even though she’s MM’s daughter) “You don’t fight fire with fire… you have to use water. So, get almost-squeaky-clean Uncle Joe B. to hold a convention before his about how the next president should help the country come out of the pandemic with fewer additional deaths and help the economy to recover by taxing the people who can afford to fix the problems, and let the American public compare it to the Monkey King’s elephant-poo festival. That way the villain can practically defeat himself.”
And so, according to mild-mannered reporter Dark Bent, that’s what Muck Man did to defeat the super-villain again. This time without generating a super-stench. And hopefully that will lead to a less-smelly world.
“But…” complained Muck Man, I was left holding on to the the world’s largest weaponized super-fart. And it exploded in my pants. Now, I have to live with consequences.”
” At least we can take comfort in the fact that Mickey is somehow still alive. And a cleaner world is better for all of us.” proclaimed Muck Woman.
Filed under comic book heroes, commentary, humor, Paffooney
How Good Things Grow from Bad Things
In the deep woods of the Pacific Northwestern portion of the United States, a great tall pine tree is struck by lightning. Of course, the threat of fire in this day and age is very real. But luckily, this time as the tree falls in flames and ignites the brush around where it falls, the sky opens up and a deluge of rain extinguishes what the lightning has ignited.
Time passes as time always seems to do. The burned area heals. The slain giant is broken down by bugs and heat and bacteria and rot. And before you know it, flowers begin to bloom there. The tree’s carbon-based flesh has fertilized the ground. And where the tree once created shade, there is now a hole to let the sunshine in. Life gets wildly busy growing.
Because of what the tree suffered, the forest floor, especially the part of it where flowers bloom, got its chance in the sun.
The same sort of rule of nature happened in politics in 2016. Bozo the Crime Boss got elected because the wave of pus and anger he surfed into power on had been festering under the skin of the country since Reagan brought judgemental, self-righteous, and fear-mongering rich-types into the political power pinnacles in 1980. The boil finally burst. De-regulating environmental protections has been a Republican priority since Ronnie Ray-Gun put James Watt in the job of Secretary of the Interior just so the forests in National Parks could be opened up to logging and oil exploration. And we have seen in the past few years how badly those changes in policy have affected our lives. The environment is on fire. We don’t have enough trees to absorb all the carbon dioxide that is causing the warming. Most of this country’s fresh water is now contaminated with an industrial waste of one sort or another. But Don Cheetoh’s recent implosion is threatening not only to wither the poisonous fruits of Republican policies but fundamentally destroy the evil-making machinery that the Republicans have worked so hard at maintaining for decades. We human beans who actually value human life over money thought 2016 was a deadly disaster. But it may instead have been more of a lancing of the boil as the twice-impeached Prexydent of the Disunited States did all his high crimes and misdemeanors in the public eye and then was routinely given a pass by Republican leaders in Congress. It reached a point with the stolen presidential documents that his crimes can no longer be covered up. The poisons may well be draining out of the holes the spoiled mango of a man poked into the very skin of our government. Look at how much climate-correction legislation was recently passed by the new, non-Cheetoh President. And look at how polls are suggesting that Democrats might not have to endure the traditional punishments for doing something good for the people that Republicans were so looking forward to. Good things are seemingly growing where the manure of the previous Republican administration has been spread.
My own life is also an example of how something terrible grew into something good. As a victim of childhood sexual assault, I spent many years grappling with trauma. But the incident made me a school teacher, determined to fight dark things like sexual assault, violence, and a will to do harm to others with the power of education, empathy, and love. As a retired teacher, I have fully embraced naturism, and am nakedly honest about many things. One of those things is that you really need to endure some badness in your life to truly understand and appreciate the good that directly comes out of having survived that evil.
I should be very clear about the fact that when I was a teacher, I was not also an active nudist at the same time. I never suggested that any child should be naked in public and never saw any of my students nude (a feat achieved by never being a coach of athletics in charge of monitoring behaviors in the shower room after events and practice.) My nudism is entirely practiced after I retired and mostly at home by myself. But it is also a good thing to grow out of the badness that occurred before. It is a chance for me to finally be at peace with who I am inside my own skin (hopefully free of boils.)
As I am now a Medicare recipient, I have to face the badness on the horizon that comes with reaching an age considered a fully-lived life. There could be heart attacks, strokes, and possibly Parkinson’s in the near future. I could lose so much of my mental self-control that I end up being charged with drawing child pornography (though I don’t believe I have done any of that. Former President George HW Bush didn’t believe he sexually harassed any young nurses from his deathbed either.) But whatever badness comes, I do believe there will be some mitigating goodness that follows because of it.
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Filed under artwork, autobiography, commentary, education, fairies, humor, Paffooney, philosophy, strange and wonderful ideas about life