Category Archives: strange and wonderful ideas about life

July 4, 2017 · 4:58 pm

Three Days Offline

This is actually Monday’s post… the last make-up post.

I am now working on the third consecutive day of being without internet service.  I quickly see what a disaster World War Three, the Cyber-War, is going to be.

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I mean, there is plenty to do.  I am trying to save my home from legal pillaging by the city trolls, so I must work in the yard.  I must also desperately work on the pool.  And since I may have to blog about it for nudists… I am going to try doing it wearing only sunscreen.  (Not the yard work in the front yard… in the back yard that is fenced in and tree-filled… with the gates tightly locked, of course.)

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This is me not actually nude… just joking around with my Cirque du Soleil clown nose and risking a sunburned back.

And I am reading a brilliantly funny book by Terry Pratchett called Raising Steam, about bringing steam trains and train travel to the fantasy medieval world he calls Discworld.  I miss Terry Pratchett.  He passed away and will never write another one.  And there are only a precious few left that I haven’t gotten to read yet.  But, he won’t be around for the third installment of the World at War Saga.  I hope I am not either… but I am probably too stubborn to just die on my own.  I am expecting now to be murdered by a Trumpcare death panel.

I am also trying ferociously to write and publish novels.  I have so many stories left to tell, and not enough time to plant the fields of imaginative rough-draft fiction, water them with re-writes and editing, and then try to harvest them by publishing.

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I no longer suffer from childish illusions that my fiction is going to change the world for the better, the way Dickens’ once did.  I know I am probably writing them only for the ash-pile, or the myopic alien squid-man that will uncover them as part of his psychotic obsession with xeno-archeology.

So there is plenty to do, but I can already see the problems that will come if everybody’s internet and electronic world breaks down at the same time.   Especially if it ends up being permanent.  I can’t pay my bills without internet banking and access to the websites I use to pay things I owe.  I can’t do any further publishing work without being able to email the publisher.  Not having internet is basically the end of the world I have been living in since I retired.  No Netflix, no Google, no email, no Twitter (Hey, it’s not all bad after all, now is it?), no access to the website that is deciding whether to send me to Bluebonnet Naturist Camp or not (is this list of problems actually getting better?), no television, and a decided lack of communication with the outside world (which means no bad news about Trump and the crazy government.  Woo Hoooooo!)

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So, while I can cope with not being online, how long can I really hold out if the Trumpian Troglodytes pitch us back out of the information age?  Think of it… a new age of coal and Trump-branded real-estate all run by a narcissistic orangutan and his piratical racist banker boys.  Not very long, I suspect.

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June 30, 2017 · 12:40 pm

Stupid Is as Stupid Does

This is not a tribute to Winston Groom and his famous creation, Forrest Gump.  This is an admission that when I have had very little sleep and lots of worry lines on my brow, I often do remarkably stupid things.

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And sometimes, doing something monumentally stupid makes me feel better.  You know, more a part of the stupid, meaningless, and goofy world around me.  So, what stupid thing did I do?  I joined a nudist organization’s website.  Me, who freaks out when members of my own family happen to see me naked.  And, you see, there is more to joining this organization than just signing up for some random thing on the internet where you get a lot of random emails.  I had to submit nude photos of myself to be posted in community forums.  And I may be able to write a blog for this website, which will mean taking some camping gear and actually going to the naturist club site near Dallas to experience the things I will be writing about… and probably making jokes about.  But don’t be afraid of being subjected to the hideous torture of having to see me naked.  In order to see any of that, you would have to join the organization yourself, and you are probably not as stupid as me.  (But I am not telling you the name of the website anyway.)

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This is a detail from an illustration based on Golding’s Lord of the Flies.  But it is also a picture of me and a childhood friend from back in the skinny-dipping days, based on an old black-and-white photo.

You see, I have some real life experiences with nudists before this happened.  I had a roommate in grad school who liked to go au naturel, and even was comfortable with me being in the room when his girlfriend was visiting.  He was nude in the kitchen one time when my grandparents came to visit.  It is a good thing my grandfather entered that room ahead of my grandmother.  I also had a girlfriend in the eighties who had a sister living in the clothing-optional apartment complex in Austin, Texas.  Every time we visited Austin, the city nearest where my parents lived, she would stay with her sister there and I would have to go in to fetch her whenever we had plans.  Sometimes I was there just to visit.  But always, since clothing was optional, I took that option.  I did get used to being around naked people, though.  I actually have nudist friends.

So, though I am not a nudist, I guess I already know a lot about how to be one.  It is how I managed to stumble into this awkward arrangement.

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I know I will never be able to get my wife to go along on this harrowing adventure.  She refuses to even consider going nude in the house.  She has to wear clothes to bed even though studies say that sleeping nude is good for you.  I will be facing this basically naked and alone.  And possible paid writing work will never make this worth it by itself.

But my photos are already posted and approved.  My membership is a real thing.  And I am not ready to shoot myself for this stupid decision.  In fact, I will probably be less naked there than I have been here in this very blog where my every secret is laid bare and made fun of on a daily basis.

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June 28, 2017 · 4:35 am

Dawn in Iowa, Sunset in Texas

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The recent Iowa trip has been more or less a metaphor for my life as a whole.  I don’t mean to be funny but… wait just a minute!  Yes I do.  This is corn-shucking humor blog, after all!  But the metaphor is still there.  I was born in Iowa.

Dawn broke over the farm yesterday where Uncle Harry used to live with his wife, Aunt Jean, and their three kids, Karen, Bob, and Tom.  Bob was in my class at school.  We got into a fight once over who should be Robin Hood when we were playing with all the cousins in the old brooder house on Grandpa Aldrich’s farm, the farm where mom and dad now live.  It was a fight that got so intense that we were throwing broke flower-pot shards at each other in anger.  Bob’s hand got cut so badly that he had to go to Belmond and get stitches.  Dang, was I in trouble after that.  Bob’s version, the shard I threw hit him right in the hand, directly between his thumb and pointer finger and cut him.  My version, he cut himself as he threw a pot shard at me, and it cut him leaving his hand.  Everyone believed Bob, of course.  I’m the nutty kid that always told the stories that gave the girls nightmares.  And those stories were never true… mostly.  So they couldn’t believe my version.

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Mom and my sister Nancy designed and executed the painted barn quilt on the work shed that used to be the chicken house.

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Bucolic farm scene to represent my Iowegian past.

But life, like days and car trips, moves on.  We had to pack up the little Ford Escort that brought me home and take off once more for Texas.  I was a little bit worried about the dog.  She didn’t poop as much in Iowa as she normally does in Texas.  Well, we figured that out on the way back.  She pooped a lot of funny colors at every rest-stop dog park on the way back to Texas because of all the people food she had eaten.  She got fed better in Iowa apparently.  And it was stuff like stolen Doritos and other stuff that is so not-good-for-her.

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But going back to Texas with two kids and a dog is a lot like me after college, moving to Texas via Trailways bus in order to become a teacher.  I got a job in Cotulla, Texas, the place where LBJ taught way back when he was a young Texan and still working at being good at telling the REALLY BIG LIES.  I think I mentioned this before, but all the kids in the painting above were real kids I taught in my first year teaching (except for the kid sleeping.,, nobody did anything but hop around and yell at me my first year as a teacher… including the principal).  Oh, and the window is imaginary.  I taught for three years in a windowless concrete box with only buzzing fluorescent lights to keep the monsters from killing and eating me… or each other.  Within a decade of that first class, two of the boys had been to prison, three were already dead, and one became a star lineman for the Texas A&M football team.

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And over time I got closer and closer to my goal.  My skills became bigger and better as a teacher.  I grew in wisdom and power.  Honestly, the grass in the picture was closer to the camera than I was, so I am looming in the sky above the photographer, not tiny and smaller than the grass.  So maybe I better claim the picture was taken by fairies.  Yeah, that’s it.  Down there in the grass.  Iowegian fairies got a hold of my camera and took the picture.  That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.  (See.  I never really learned to get away with the REALLY BIG LIES.  A teacher, as a storyteller, has to also be a truth-teller.)

fulldance  So we returned to Texas, and that is probably where the sunset of my life will take place.  I am retired from teaching now.  I am blogging and telling lies instead… well, writing fiction.  I should have another book published soon.  And it has fairies in it.  So maybe there is still time to pull off the REALLY BIG LIES.

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June 25, 2017 · 2:26 pm

Followed by a Moon Shadow

Moonshadow by Cat Stevens

I first heard this song as a freshman in coll20160424_181349ege.  It struck me that it was hauntingly beautiful… but maybe I wasn’t entirely sure what it meant.

The song is about losing body parts and being okay with that.

That can actually be kinda creepy, right?

It is probably a song about gradually dying.

But that’s not really what it’s about.

I am there now.  Peeling, cracking, drying out… my life has reached the downhill run toward the finish line.  But I am not worried and not afraid.  Life is so much more than hands and eyes and legs and feet.  I can lose those things and have no regrets.  I am so much more than merely the sum of those physical things.

My spirit soars.  And my life is bound up in words and meanings that are now written down, and are at least as imperishable as paper.  And may, in fact, be written on a few human hearts here and there.

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June 15, 2017 · 3:20 pm

The Cottonwood on the Corner

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The old cottonwood tree on the Aldrich farm corner has been there for as long as I can remember.  It was there when I was a small boy visiting Grandpa Aldrich’s farm.  It is still there 55 years later as I visit Mom and Dad who are still living on the farm.  A lot has changed.  Time has passed.  It is a different decade, a different century, a different millennium.

The old tree is like an anchor in time.  I can come home and look at it and be taken back in time.  I know that tree.  And he knows me.

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That isn’t true of all of the trees on the farm.

 

 

 

 

This pine by the house is tree who is younger than me.  I can remember when it was planted.  It was not so very many years ago.

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This gnarled old tree in the grove may be about the same age as I am.  I remember it when both it and I were small and we played together in the grove.  I was Tarzan, Jungle Jim, and the Lone Ranger.  It was the post I leaned on in my secret lookout post.  Back then my hand went most of the way around the trunk.

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It is good to come home to a place where you know the trees personally.  You can revisit old haunts, see old friends and acquaintances, and walk along gravel roads in a place where there is little traffic and no smog.

So I came back to Iowa to visit a tree.  Well, the farm place and aging parents too.

 

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June 11, 2017 · 4:12 pm

Silly Sunday Stuff

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I made a choice, long about 1980 or so.  And I have not regretted that choice.  I became a teacher instead of the writer/artist I thought I wanted to be.  And the more I look back on it now, if I had gone the writer route back then, I could’ve eventually become an author like Terry Brooks who wrote the Shannara books.  I might’ve even been as good as R.A. Salvatore whose fantasy adventure stories have reached the best seller list.  Back then, in the 1980’s I could’ve eventually broke into the business and been successful.  Even as late as when Frank McCourt broke onto the literary scene with his memoir, Angela’s Ashes in 1996, I might’ve been able to transition from teacher to writer the way he did.  But I chose to keep going with a teaching career that enthralled me.

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Publishing and the literary scene is changing now.  And it is no longer possible for someone like me to break into the big time.  I am an author who has come aboard a sinking ship.

But I have stories to tell.  They have lived inside me for more than thirty years.  And I am scrambling now to get them told before my crappy old body completely betrays me and makes the chance go away.  I will get them told… even if no one ever listens.

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And there are some advantages to doing it the way I have done it.  It is, and always has been, about the people in my life.  My wife, my children, my students, my co-workers, my cousins by the dozens, my little town in Iowa…  they are the people in my stories.  My stories are true to life, even if they have werewolves and fairies and living gingerbread men and nudists in them.  I live in a cartoon world of metaphor and surrealism, after all.  I would not have had the depth of character-understanding in my stories without my experiences as a teacher.  And I really don’t have to worry about the whole marketing thing any more.  I am not on that treadmill.  I do not have to be aware of what the market is looking for.  If my writing ever turns a profit, I won’t live long enough to see it anyway.  And that has never been what it is all about.

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I can do anything I please with my stories.  They belong to me.  I do not owe the world anything.  What I give you now in this blog and in my books, is given for love, not profit.  I can even write a pointless blog post about Sunday blather and illustrate it with Tintin drawings by Herge. And you can’t stop me.  And, hopefully… you don’t even want to.

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June 10, 2017 · 12:49 pm

Eberron

When you play Dungeons and Dragons the way we constantly do, it helps to have an over-all campaign, a world created by gifted imaginers to play in and use as the setting for all our adventures.

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There are good published campaign worlds to choose from.  We chose the Eberron world because it was so thoroughly magical and and steam-punk in nature and artwork.

This is a world where magic and alchemy have taken the place of science in the world’s technology.  Instead of airplanes, the magic-technicians known as magewrights in Eberron bind the living air and fire elementals to their ships and use elemental magic to fly.

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Even robot-like constructs called warforged are built by magewrights to become, not only warriors to fill out armies, but sentient individuals with personalities and complex problems and emotions.  Book in the illustration above is a warforged wizard.  Book is his name.  Warforged are very simple artificial people… but also complicated.  They name themselves after weapons, armor parts, and random things.

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A campaign world provides places and non-player characters to interact with.  As well as monsters to kill and exotic locations to kill them in.  Eberron has its unique peoples, like Shifters.  Shifters are a race of people who are the result of humans loving lycanthropes… you know, werewolves and weretigers and weresharks and other were-things.

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Our family game got involved from adventure number one with the secret service of the Kingdom of Breland, the Dark Lanterns, so Breland and it’s cities became something of a home base.

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The city known as Sharn, City of Towers, became a particularly fascinating home base.  The Broken Anvil Inn in the mid-reaches of Dura became a sometimes place to live and alwaystimes place to drink liquor and recruit weird friends.  And this is a vast city with a cluster of mile-high towers and a population of various peoples and monsters from throughout the continent of Khorvaire.

So if you have been reading any of my Saturday D & D posts, and found the place names confusing and hard to remember, now you have this post to read and confuse you even more thoroughly.  How do I, as dungeon master, keep it all straight?  I don’t.  I bought the books and I am constantly looking stuff up.  In fact, I often assign number one son the Player’s Handbook for Eberron to look up that stuff, number two son gets the Campaign Guide to look stuff up in, and the Princess handles the Monster Manuals.  (Really, I have spent a ton of pennies on the books and have too many to juggle them all myself.)

So we play the game in a world called Eberron and share the fantasies and stories of world where magic is science and science is magic.

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June 9, 2017 · 1:07 pm

Why Do You Think That? Part 4

I had to think long and hard about this.  I don’t know how to go about it because I myself am really the opposite of a nudist or a naturist.  I cover up parts of me in public that most people don’t because of psoriasis and unsightly sores on my arms, hands, neck, and jawline.  But I used to know naturists.  I have walked among them, even though I was never brave enough to actually walk naked among them.  But I have this goofy thought that has been nagging me from a back corner of the upstairs filing rooms of my stupid old head.  All people are actually nudists under their clothes.

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Now, if a doofus is trying to argue something as crazily goofy as this, he better have some good main points backed up by real research.  I, of course, am probably not as sensible as that, so let me go with these three main points;

  1. Public nudity is not an invasion of privacy since the person pretty much has to be intentionally nude, and they are not revealing anything that isn’t true of all of us.
  2. Artists really need to draw and paint nudes because one can’t create realistic figures without discovering how to do it by practice.
  3. Naked people are generally happier and more sane than the rest of us.

 

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When I was visiting my girlfriend in the 1980’s at the clothing-optional apartment complex in Austin, Texas, I did not option for naked.  And I really couldn’t protest naked hairy guys strutting in front of me by the pool because I knew what was inside the gate when I knocked the first time.  Nudists are not really suffering from invasion of privacy.  They choose to be naked and choose to be in these places like nude beaches where other people are naked too.

You don’t accidentally become a nudist.  (Even though I wrote a novel about a boy accidentally becoming a nudist in Iowa in the 70’s.)  Even the nudists I have posted in these pictures are not having their privacy violated.  These images originate with old naturist publications purchased in the 80’s.   That means they intended them to be seen.  In fact, I am able to find ample nudism seeking an audience on Facebook and Twitter.

Twitter link to NeoNudist

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BBC Why All Artists Should Have Naked Ambition

And either drawing nude models is an essential part of art training, or all people who learn to draw are perverts and just make art so they can ogle nude models.  I wrote in this crazy blog before about my experience with college-level nude drawing class.  I got a “C+”, not because I wasn’t any good at drawing the naked female art students and naked exhibitionist hairy guys that posed for us, but because the teacher was hyper critical and probably anal-retentive just the way all really exceptional art teachers probably are.

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I am quite capable of drawing the delicate and exquisite nude figure without becoming a gynecological illustrator or even a crude, rude dude.  And there is art to it.  It is not meaningless.

But in the final analysis, we all have a bit of the nudist instinct in us.  We all secretly enjoy those times when we were able to be naked, however briefly, in the warm enfolding light of the sun.  If you have not experienced that and don’t know what I’m talking about, then why have you read this far through the post?  Why have my posts about drawing nudes and being around naturists been my most popular posts?

We have that urge to go naked because that is how God made us.  Being naked in the company of other naked people is actually good for you.  At least, Scientific American thinks so.

Benefits of Nudity from Scientific American

Daily Mail Being naked makes us happier with our bodies

In truth, my time among the naturists helped me recover from the trauma of being sexually assaulted by another boy when I was ten.  That was a long, painful journey that deprived me for a while of being able to be naked.  For a while I was too damaged to be a happy naturist.  But I have come so far now; I can even make this admission in writing.  I would like to be a nudist, even if only for a very brief while.  In fact, I think we are all at least a bit like that.  Now, if only my skin would stop flaking and peeling off.

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June 2, 2017 · 2:56 pm

Books are Life, and Life is Books

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I just finished reading David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks, his novel from 2014.  Just, WOW!  I guess this post is technically a book review… but not really.  I have to talk about so much more than just the book.

You can see in my initial illustration that I read this book to pieces.  Literally.  (And I was an English Major in college, so I LITERALLY know what literally means!)

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Look at this face.  Can you stop looking at the beautiful eyes?  I can’t.

I discovered Mitchell as a writer when I happened onto the book and movie pair of Cloud Atlas.  It enthralled me.  I read the book, a complex fantasy about time and connections, about as deeply and intricately as any book that I have ever read.  I fell in love.  It was a love as deep and wide as my love of Dickens or my love of Twain… even my love of Terry Pratchett.

It is like the picture on the left.  I can’t stop looking into it and seeing more and more.  It is plotted and put together like a finely crafted jeweled timepiece.

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And this new book is almost exactly like that.  It is a first- person narrative in six parts with five different narrators.  Holly Sykes, the central character, is the narrator of the first and last parts, in the past in the 1980’s, and in the future in 2043.  The titular metaphor of the bone clocks is about the human body and how it measures time from youth to old age.  And it is pictured as a clock ticking in practically all it’s forms, from a child who is snuffed out at eight years of age to horologists who have lived for a thousand years by being reincarnated with past lives intact.

Fantasy and photographic realism intertwine and filigree this book like a vast kaleidoscope of many colors, peoples, societies, and places.  At one point David Mitchell even inserts himself into the narrative cleverly as the narrator of part four, Crispin Hershey, the popular English novelist struggling to stay on top of the literary world.  He even indulges every writer’s fantasy and murders himself in the course of the story.

David Mitchell is the reason I have to read voraciously and write endlessly.  His works seem to contain an entire universe of ideas and portraits and events and predictions and wisdoms. And he clearly shows me that his universe is not the only one that needs to be written before the world ends.  Books are life, and life is in books.  And when the world as we know it is indeed gone, then they will be the most important thing we ever did.  Even if no one is left to read them.

And so, I read this book until it fell into pieces, its spine broken and its back cover lost.  To be fair, I bought it at a used book store, and the paperback copy was obviously read by previous owners cover to cover.  The pages were already dog eared with some pages having their corners turned down to show where someone left off and picked up reading before me.  But that, too, is significant.  I am not the only one who devoured this book and its life-sustaining stories.  Know that, if you do decide to read and love this book, you are definitely not the only one.  I’d lend you my copy.  But… well, it’s already in pieces.

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May 27, 2017 · 2:10 pm

Comedy Relief in D & D

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Dungeon Masters all tend to run their own style of game.  Some like complex puzzle-solving dungeons with complex traps and mysteries involving hidden rooms and old secrets.  I admit to having done that.  Some like hack-and-slash adventures where the slaying of hordes of mindless monsters can last for hours.  I admit to having done less of that.  And some, like me, are all about the people… even if the people happen to be monsters.  Monsters can be people too, right?  Just ask Herman Munster.

And my favorite kind of character is the random buffoon or fool who is essential to the plot.

Eli Tragedy

Eli Tragedy is such a fool.  He began as a computer character whom I used as me in a long ago 80’s computer D & D game called The Bard’s Tale.  It was mostly about collecting doodads and dimbledy-dumb in dungeons, and finding the right keyholes, eyeless idols, or shop keeper to use them with.  But later incarnations were also me, but as a very wise but outwardly idiotic wizard who always knew the answers to the sphinx’s riddles, but would never tell until it was funny to do so.  He also had a number of apprentices.  Bob was rather dim.  But he could do light spells pretty good… so Eli sent him down dark tunnels to see what might be down there that would want to eat him.  Usually over the objections of the player-characters who really wanted to know what was down there, but had grown fond of Bob and his blunderings.    And even burly fighters with a lust for treasure can actually have a heart.

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Mickey the wererat, was another apprentice who caused more than his fair share of chaos.  (A wererat, as I’m sure you know, is a lycanthrope that is human by day, but turns into a rat-man by night.)  Mickey had a penchant for stealing the wizard’s magic hat and using it to do horrendously stupid things that created really big messes for the player characters to clean up.  How do you stop an army of sentient gummibears bent on painting your castle with pink frosting?  It had to be dealt with.  (And why did Eli keep that old hat around, anyway?  He never used it for anything beyond letting Mickey steal it.)

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And, of course, there was the incident with the mermaid whom the players rescued from the Black Reef.  She was a bard with a harp and quite capable of making the magical music that helps dungeon divers  do their dirty-work deep in the dungeon dwellings of dangerous denizens.

They rescued her, and thanks to a fins to feet spell, were able to take her back to Sharn, the City of Towers, to be the bard for their adventuring group.  Unfortunately the fins to feet magic does not include a summon pants spell in it.  And how do you convince a mermaid to wear an article of clothing that no other mermaid ever needs to wear?

Walking around town with no pants, however, proved to be a boon in disguise.  (Boon as in a good thing, not short for baboon.  That would be another tangent entirely, a baboon in disguise.)

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The owner of the Broken Anvil Inn, where the adventuring team was living, asked the mermaid to go on stage for a song.  She started to sing a seriously sorcery-sort of song… while not wearing pants, and became an overnight sensation in Sharn.  She helped his business so much that he offered the adventuring party a place to park their carcass permanently.  So now, if you go to the Broken Anvil Inn in Sharn, it is pretty likely the entertainment will be the Princess Anduriel, mermaid bard, singing and playing the harp.  And she still won’t be wearing any pants.  The crowd loves her for it.

So it should be obvious to you now the kind of Dungeon Master I truly am.  And it will also help to explain why my kids are totally mortified by the idea of me dungeon-mastering for their friends.  “But, Dad!  We have to be able to show our faces in school Monday morning you know!”

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