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.
Maybe I should be more careful about drawing young ladies in the nude. This is not a sexualized depiction, but not everybody who sees it will judge it that way. Many Texans are convinced nakedness is always a sin.
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.)
Looking out at the end of the drive at our family farm in Iowa.
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.
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.
The drawings I have included in this post are all made from pictures of real nude models, all of them happy and pleased to be seen in the nude.
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.
This girl was happy with the original pencil sketch of her that I turned into this pen and ink. Her parents were pleased that it did not look so much like her that she could be identified by non-nudists.
This is not supposed to be the same girl, though Katie says this looks more like Naomi than it does her. I suppose she is right. (Neither of these names are the names of the real girls.)
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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.
It is a difficult thing to be an atheist who believes in God. Sometimes it takes an oxymoron to find the Truth. And you often have to go heavily on the “moron” portion of the word.
The thing I find most distressing about faith is the fact that those who have it are absolutely convinced that if you don’t agree with them and whatever book of fairy tales they believe in and interpret for you, then you are not a True Believer and you do not have real Faith.
I remember being told by a Mormon girl in one of my classes that I was her all-time favorite teacher, but she was deeply distressed that, because of my religion (I professed to be a Jehovah’s Witness at the time) I was doomed to burn in Hell forever.
Hey, I was raised in Iowa. I have experienced minus 100 degree Fahrenheit windchill. I am among those who think a nice warm afterlife wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing.
But I am no longer actually a Jehovah’s Witness. So I guess that helps with the whole Hell-burning thing. The Witnesses are a religion that claims to understand the Bible is full of metaphorical truth, and yet insist that it is literally true. They don’t believe in Hell, which, honestly, is not actually mentioned or explained in the Bible as we have it now. But they do believe your prospects for eternal life on a paradise Earth are totally contingent on knocking on doors and telling other people that they must believe what you believe or experience eternal destruction. I have stopped being an active Witness and knocking on doors because I got old and sick, and all the caring brothers and sisters in the congregation stopped coming around to visit because number one son joined the Marines, and the military is somehow evil hoodoo that cancels out any good you have done in the past. Being a Jehovah’s Witness was really hard work with all the meetings (5 per week), Bible reading (I have read the entire Bible two and a half times), door-knocking, and praying, and you apparently can lose it all for saying, thinking, or doing one wrong thing.
According to the Baptist preachers, Jehovah’s Witness elders, religious zealots, and other opinionated religious people I have known and dealt with in my life, if I do not believe what they believe and agree with them in every detail, then I do not know God and am therefore an atheist. So, okay, I guess I am. If I have to be an atheist to believe whole-heartedly that everyone is entitled to sincerely believe whatever the hell they want to believe, then I’ll wear that label.
On a personal note, my favorite verse of the Bible has always been 1 John 4:8, “He that does not love has not come to know God, because God is love.” That is why I claim to be an atheist who believes in God. I know love. I love all men, women, children, animals, sunrises, artwork, paintings of angels by Bouguereau… everything that is. And I even love you if you exercise your freedom to tell me, “Your ideas are totally wrong, and you are going to burn in Hell, Mickey, you bad guy, you!” Mark Twain always said, “I would choose Heaven for climate, but I would prefer Hell for company.” I am not going to worry about it. I will be in good company. Some things are just bigger than me. And trying to control things like that is nonsense. Sorta like this post.
It began for me in 1977 with this wrap-around cover illustration. I knew there were a lot of this guy’s books on the shelves of the college bookstore along with works by Robert E. Howard, Roger Zelazney, and Theodore Sturgeon. And I knew this guy had also written paperback books under the name “Andrew North”, a name I had seen on the twenty-five cent novels in the drugstore where you could buy the really good pulp fiction novels only slightly used.
I had never before bought one of his books. And the book money I had for the fall quarter at Iowa State was supposed to all go towards the book-list given to me as a Junior-level English major. But the naked kid on the cover had a wired-up collar around his neck. And I had only recently recovered long-suppressed memories of being a victim of a sexual assault. I had to have it. I had to know what that illustration had to do with the story inside.
So, I bought a book that I judged by its cover.
And it was not the wrong thing to do.
The main character was a boy named Jony, the naked boy on the cover of the book. He is taken by alien beings as a study specimen along with his mother, the pregnant woman on the back of the wrap-around illustration. The story starts with Jony in a cage, treated like an animal. His mother, also a study specimen has been mated to a Neanderthal-like humanoid specimen who cannot speak, and she has given birth to twins, a boy, and a girl. They are kept in separate cages by their inhuman captors.
Jony manages a mass escape, taking his mother and his younger siblings with him, and releasing as many of the other study specimens as he can. Luckily they escape onto a very earth-like planet. But unluckily, the mother is in very poor health and dies soon after escaping. Jony is then responsible for his little brother and sister in a wilderness that is not empty of others. Luckily, the others they first run afoul of are the bear-like ursine aliens who share their need to not be recaptured by the zoo-keeper aliens.
It was a perfect novel for me. I identified strongly with the main character, who had been violated in a very personal way by monsters. And then had to build a new life in a world full of potential other-monsters. Andre Norton shared my pain and helped me overcome it.
But she also fooled me big-time. She was not a he.
She was a librarian and editor of pulp fiction who wrote enough sci-fi and fantasy in the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s to finally become a full-time author.
She was already on book number 29 when she retired from being a librarian to write full time.
And I would go on to own and read several of her other books, which were good, but never quite lived up to that first one I read. Of course, that may have been because of the timing and circumstance that led me to a book that I actually needed to read. That book set me on the road to recovery from my personal darkness. And it may have sparked in me the need to eventually become a nudist. And more important than that, it may have led me to a lifelong need to teach reading.
Andre Norton was a real writer. And she made me one too. Though I never knew who she really was until after I bought that book because of the picture on the cover. And I never got around to properly thanking her for all of that… Until this very moment.
Yes, I am saying the world I live in is a low-budget commercial movie made without literary or artistic pretensions. You know, the kind where movie makers learn their craft, taking big risks with smaller consequences, and making the world of their picture reflect their heart rather than the producer’s lust for money.
Mostly what I am talking about are the movies I remember from late-night Saturday TV in black and white (regardless of whether or not the movie was made in Technicolor) and the less-risky as well as more-likely-good Saturday matinees on Channel 3. Movies made in the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s. They were perfect, of course, for the forbidden Midnight Movie on the show called Gravesend Manor. I had to sneak downstairs to watch it on Saturday nights with the volume turned way down low. (Not that Mom and Dad didn’t know. Well, maybe they didn’t know how many of those I watched completely naked… maybe.)
I watched this one when I was twelve, late night on an October Saturday. I had a bed-sheet with me to pull over my head at the scariest parts. Frankenstein was a crashed astronaut brought back to life by the magic of space radiation. He was uglier than sin, but still the hero of the movie, saving the Earth from invading guys in gorilla suits and scary masks (none of which looked like the movie poster.)
This one, starring James Whitmore, a really good B-Movie actor, was about giant ants coming up from the sewers and the underground to eat the city.
I would end up watching it again twenty years later when I was wearing clothes and not alone in the dark house lit only by a black-and-white TV screen.
I realized on the second viewing that it was actually a pretty good movie in spite of cheesy special effects. And I realized too that I had learned from James Whitmore’s hero character that, in times of crisis, you have to run towards the trouble rather than away from it, a thing that I used several times in my teaching career with fights and tornadoes and even rattlesnakes visiting the school campus looking to eat a seventh-grader or something (though it was a bad idea for the snake even if it had been successful.)
This one, of course, taught me that monsters liked to carry off pretty girls in bikinis. And not just on the poster, either. But it was the hero that got the girl, not the monster. This movie taught me that it sucks to be the monster. Though it also taught me that it was a good movie to take your pajamas off for and watch naked when you are thirteen.
But not all B-movies had to be watched late night on Saturdays. This movie was one of the first ones that I got to go to the movie theater to see by myself. (My sisters and little brother were still too young and got nightmares too easily to see such a movie.) It came out when I was in my teens and Mom and Dad began thinking of me as an adult once… or even possibly twice in a month.
And not all B-movies were monster movies, gangster movies, and westerns. Some, like a lot of Danny Kaye’s movies, were movies my Dad and my grandparents were more than happy to watch with me. I saw this one in both black-and-white and color. And I learned from this that it was okay to take advantage of happy accidents, like a case of mistaken identity, and using your wits, your creative singing ability, and your inexplicable good luck to win the day for everybody but the bad guys armed only with your good sense of humor.
And some of the best movies I have ever seen, judging by what I learned about movies as literature from Professor Loring Silet in his Modern Film Class at Iowa State University, are by their nature B-movies.
I am using movie posters in this blog post only from movies I have personally seen. (And I admit that not all of them are strictly “good” movies according to Professor Silet, but I like them all.)
Feel free to tell me in the comments if you have seen any of these movies yourself. I am open to all opinions, comments, and confessions.
This one is based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
I saw this one in college. You had to be 18 at the time to even buy a ticket.
I actually think that this is one of the best movies ever made. It will always make my own personal top-ten list.
I live in a B-movie world. The production values around me are not the top-dollar ones. But the stories are entertaining. The real-life heroes still run towards the problem. And it still sucks to be the monster. But it has always been worth the price of the ticket. And during my time on Earth here, even in 2020, I plan on staying till the end of the picture. I go nowhere until I see the Best Boy’s name in the end credits. And maybe not even then.
This is a story about an innocuous piece of furniture in Great Aunt Minnie Efram’s house. It was a little brown loveseat with carved wooden monster feet.
As the story begins, the little loveseat was sitting in the parlor in front of the small black and white television. During the monthly Efram family card party, the love seat was the only place for the two of them to spend the evening. But he was ten and he hated girls. He had a reputation with the guys at school as a girl hater, and he couldn’t have it known that he was sitting on a loveseat with Uncle Henry’s stepdaughter, the one the guys all said they had seen eating her own boogers.
She was also ten, and in his class at school. She liked to watch him more than any of the other boys. But she didn’t know why. She liked unicorns and the color pink, but she also kinda liked the way boys looked at her when she wore shorts. And she liked seeing him in PE class at school, wearing shorts. He was athletic and often won games in PE.
After two years of monthly card parties happening during at least three different months every year at Aunt Minnie’s place, he had discovered that girls didn’t actually smell bad, and this one actually listened when he talked about playing football, and how it made him feel when he scored the seventy-five-yard touchdown. In fact, the more he talked about football, and the closer they sat to each other, the better she seemed to smell. He liked that smell.
She liked that he didn’t only pay attention to her at the card parties anymore. He actually said, “Hi” in public. And she liked his smile, even when he got braces. He let her pick the shows they watched on the old black and white television while seated on the loveseat. She actually worked up the nerve to tell him that she had told Jane at school to ask him if he liked her, and stupid Jane had completely forgotten to ask him, or maybe Jane was just too chicken to ask him and used the excuse that she forgot.
He said that if she liked him, he liked her. But if she didn’t, he didn’t either. “Like” her, he meant. Which he did because she did.
After two more years and six more card parties worth of scootching behinds closer together on the old loveseat, something different had happened. And it was about time too. Aunt Minnie had bought a puppy, and that not only was a bad thing for the seven cats that lived with old Minnie, but it was hard on the loveseat too. One of the little couch’s monster feet was lost, and the numerous instances of terrified cat claws digging in were beginning to have an effect on the upholstery. And that danged dog wizzled everywhere. The loveseat had one purpose in life, and it didn’t want to give in to wear and tear before achieving that purpose.
But the very next year brought disaster. He apparently told the members of the freshman football team that something had happened on that old love seat that really hadn’t happened. The football team was impressed because they all thought she was pretty hot stuff, and he was generally thought of as a lame-o dweeb. She heard about it from Jane who heard about it from Nanette’s boyfriend who was on the team. And she got mad. How dare he say something like that when it wasn’t true?
In January of that year, Aunt Minnie passed away in her sleep. The loveseat was sold at auction to a farmer who liked to do re-upholstery as a hobby. It got re-done in red velvet and leather with wheels replacing the wooden monster feet and sold to a car dealer in Des Moines who placed it in the lobby show-room for customers to sit on.
But the story has a happy ending. She would later make his locker room lie into the truth on Prom Night (fortunately with protection) and then went on to marry him when they both were sophomores in college. Of course, it wasn’t always, “They lived happily ever after,” because they didn’t. They got divorced once and got re-married shortly after… to each other. They had three kids. And the loveseat didn’t ever learn any of that. Because it was a loveseat. You didn’t really think loveseats could know anything, did you?
Yes, I am a nudist. I am a member of the AANR (American Association for Nude Recreation). I have been publicly naked in places where other naked people are, and I will do that again if I can. But, if you are wondering why in the heck I want to be that, well, maybe I need to explain. Maybe, even, if you aren’t wondering that.
I have spent a lifetime overcoming childhood trauma. At the age of ten I was grabbed by an older boy, dragged off to a hidden place, de-pants, warned not to yell or tell anybody ever about what had happened, implying he would seriously hurt or kill me, and then he gave himself pleasure by twisting my private parts, making me hurt while being forbidden to call for help.
What does that have to do with being a nudist? Well, as you can probably imagine, what remained of my childhood and all of my puberty was turned into a nightmare. I shut down the memory of the incident as a defense mechanism, but it was still with me to the point that I would wet my pants during seventh grade classes rather than risk going to the bathroom in a school where there were eighth grade boys bigger than me. PE showers after class were a nightmare I wasn’t allowed to avoid. I not only had to conceal my privates as much as possible, but also the burn scars on my back that I gave myself as a punishment for any sexual urges I might have experienced. I lost the ability to be comfortably naked anywhere that I might’ve been seen by others, especially girls. This was a horrible, self-hating sort of thing that brought me to the brink of suicide in high school. Thank god for the Methodist minister who provided me with actual sex education and my friend Ronny who talked me out of killing myself without ever knowing that that is what he was doing.
I missed out on a key time in my development as a boy when others get an unmolested chance to wrestle with their own sexuality and identity. I had to struggle with the things I learned about child molestation. Of particular concern was the notion that victims of sexual molestation can grow up to be molesters. And a good deal of religious education tries to make you believe homosexuality was a grievous sin that could cause you an eternity in Hell. I spent too many hours fearing I would become exactly what I didn’t want to be.
But starting when the Reverend Aiken taught me about the biological science behind the facts of life, I began learning the truth about sexuality and what had happened to me.
I fully remembered the whole of my childhood trauma when I began studying human sexuality in college (and I mean book-learning, not the kind of hands-on practice that went on in the dorms.) I learned that those who become abusers after being abused were mostly children who were routinely molested, not the one-time-only sort of assault that I endured. I was not set up mentally to become some sort of sexual predator or pedophile. Instead, I was drawn to a career path in education where I could use what I had learned to prevent such things from happening. I did not try to have my abuser arrested and punished for two reasons. One, because I was still vulnerable and reporting that you had been assaulted like that was probably even harder at that time for a boy than it was for a girl. And it was hell to be a girl confessing to having been raped. But also two, because I knew my abuser was married and had children, and I had never heard any other reports of him having done such a thing to anyone else. It wasn’t for him that I didn’t report him. My family and his family were friends. They were good people whether he was or not. And protecting them is the reason I still will not name him as the person who assaulted me. Now that he is dead, and I have forgiven him, no one needs to know.
I need to be naked now in the telling of these inner secrets that no one but me knew for so many years. I need to not be shy about any of this. Primarily because anyone who has ever undergone such a thing as I did can benefit from knowing what I went through and survived in spite of. That factual nakedness is here in these paragraphs for anyone who needs to see it. It is the naked truth.
The first person I told about what happened to me at ten was the former girlfriend who actually introduced me to nudism and naturism. She was a coworker in the Cotulla school district who, like me, had family living at the time in the Austin, Texas area. We would spend weekends in the Austin area with me staying at my parents’ house in the Austin suburbs, and her staying with her sister’s family at a clothing-optional apartment house on Manor Road in downtown Austin. We would enjoy seeing the sights in Austin, taking in the available nightlife, restaurants, and things to do in the 1980s. We also enjoyed time spent with family. Of course, the uncomfortable thing was that spending time with her family meant being surrounded by naked people. They allowed me to remain within the clothing option, but they worked on me and reasoned with me about why trying nude living was a good thing.
They made it clear how being nude leads to many good and healthy things. Sunshine provides Vitamin D which is necessary to be happy and fend off depression. They made it clear how being naked makes it easier to trust others and feel trusted by them. You learn, even with clothes on, that you should connect with people eye to eye. Genitals were never the focus of your attention, and practicing that relieved a lot of the body-horror my ten-year-old mind had imposed on my soul.
They say that dolphins, living completely naked in the oceans are surrounded their whole lives by sensory joy and a zest for life unmatched by most humans. And they also say being a nudist wrapped only in sunshine and gentle breezes is nearly the same thing.
So, I eventually tried it for myself. (Only after I retired from teaching, though, as many parents and principals would not be particularly keen about a nudist English teacher teaching their precious ones.)
My wife is not overjoyed with my choice to be a nudist. It’s not so much that she disapproves, but she is completely devoted to a religion that does. And my children are embarrassed by it and don’t want to talk about it. But it has become a good thing in my life never-the-less.
I have learned to accept my body as it is, and my past experiences as they are. I know I am not a homosexual, though I also know it is not an evil thing to be one. I know I am not a sex-fiend or a pedophile because I have committed no crime that would make those labels apply to me. I haven’t, in fact, ever committed a crime that I was aware of. I am aware of the beauties, especially in art, of the nude human form. I am also aware, having seen other nudists, that no amount of wrinkled or saggy or freckled or sunburnt or boney or fat actually takes away from that inherent beauty. I like to draw naked people, as you have often seen in this blog. But I am not the sort of nudist who has to show you constant nude photos of myself. I am not an exhibitionist or an advocate of nudism that thinks his own nudity is the best advertisement there is for being naked.
But I need to be naked. Naked stories, naked essays, naked confessions, naked pictures… because being naked is a good thing to be.
Imagination is always the place I go in times of trouble. I have a part of my silly old brain devoted to dancing the cartoon dance of the dundering doofus. It has to be there that I flee to and hide because problems and mistakes and guilt and pessimism are constantly building un-funny tiger-traps of gloom for me to rot at the bottom of. You combat the darkness with bright light. You combat hatred with love. You combat unhappiness with silly cartoonish imaginings. Well… maybe you don’t. But I do.
When reading the Sunday funnies in the newspaper on lazy Sunday afternoons, I spent years admiring Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes for its artistry and imaginative humor, believing it was about a kid who actually had a pet talking tiger. I didn’t get the notion that Hobbes was actually a toy tiger for the longest time. That’s because it was basically the story of my own boyhood. I had a stuffed tiger when I was small. He talked. He went on adventures with me. And he talked me into breaking stuff and getting into trouble with Mom and Dad. It was absolutely realistic to me.
I have always lived in my imagination. Few people see the world the way I view it. I have at least four imaginary children to go along with the three that everybody insists are real. There’s Radasha, the boy faun, my novel characters Tim Kellogg and Valerie Clarke, and the ghost dog that lurks around the house, especially at night. That plus Dorin, Henry, and the Princess (the three fake names that I use in this blog for my three real children).
Have you noticed how Watterson’s water-color backgrounds fade into white nothingness the way daydreams do? Calvin and Hobbes were always a cartoon about turning the unreal into the real, turning ideas upside down and looking at them through the filter-glasses of Spaceman Spiff.
Unique and wonderful solutions to life’s problems can come about that way. I mean, I can’t actually use a bloggular raygun to vaporize city pool inspectors, but I can put ideas together in unusual ways to overcome challenges. I almost got the pool running again by problem-solving and repairing cracks myself.
So, I am now facing the tasks of working out a chapter 13 bankruptcy and having a swimming pool removed. The Princess will need to be driven to and from school each day. I will need to help Henry find another after-school job. And the cool thing is, my imaginary friends will all be along for the ride. Thank you, Calvin. Thank you, Hobbes. You made it all possible. So, please, keep dancing the dance of the dundering doofus.
Catch a Falling Star 
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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