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Bacterial Conjunctivitis

Bacterial conjunctivitis tends to occur in one eye and may accompany an ear infection.

I am definitely tired of being ill.

The world does look different when seen through a red eye. Both literally and figuratively. Not only does it feel like something is embedded in my eye, but I am sensitive to bright light, and my daughter is afraid to look at my eye. I am apparently a type of vampire who doesn’t sparkle.

I have to rely on my immune system to take care of it. I am too cash-strapped to go to the doctor and get medication that may not work anyway.

And my health insurance only covers things that won’t actually kill me and there is no chance that I will get.

So for now, I live with one evil eye and one eye that is almost good.

So, extended tax payments are now coming due. I am running out of money again and must turn back to Uber. And Mickey’s right eye is half red with a pink-eye infection (causing body aches, nausea, and slight fever). I did not get the next page done. It may very well start taking two weeks instead of one to do new pages.

I have told you before that I am blessed with the mental quirk known as synesthesia. I get sensory impressions of things that they can’t possibly have, but my brain imposes them anyway. For instance, today is a Thursday, so it is a yellow-ochre day. You can’t actually see the colors of a day or a month, but I do. I have very strong impressions with crossed-up sensory input. Mondays are teal blue, except in the month of September which is sky blue, so they become a darker blue or indigo-color day every week. And this weird mental mini-illness also applies to fiction.

For example, the character of Atticus Finch, the lawyer and father of Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird comes across to me as a beige character. He represents a hero who struggles to do what is essentially right in a difficult situation. He faces raising Scout and her older brother Gem in a time and place where racism and vindictiveness are often dominant, and fairness and a sense of equity is often lost in the face of those problems. Hence, I believe that if he was some kind of pure, saintly character, he would be pure white as a character. But he has to make compromises. He has to shoot the rabid dog. He has to accept food and other goods in lieu of fees from people who can’t otherwise pay a lawyer for legal help. He has to defend a black man from wrongful rape charges as a public defender. But he is definitely a good man. He understands and accepts the shortcomings of a damaged soul like Boo Radley. He defends Tom Robinson, the black man, as an equal, even as a friend. He has to defeat the Ewells in court, but he understands and feels sympathy for abused Mayella Ewell.

Atticus Finch is beige in color because he is a character of firm principles who is not perfect, and slightly browned by the compromises of a regular hard life.

Captain Ahab, from the novel Moby-Dick, is a very different character, though he is played here by the same actor, Gregory Peck. Ahab is a dark navy-blue character. Navy blue is a color associated with the sea and the Navy (well, duh!), but also represents the depths of the ocean, the darkness that can fill the deepest corners of the obsessive mind. It is not quite a black villainous color, but definitely darker than what is needed. Ahab is a main character in his story, but definitely not a hero. He is an obsessive-compulsive nightmare, which is also a navy-blue thing. He is a storm-cloud threatening to sink his own ship, which he eventually does, and also a navy-blue thing.

Captain Keith Mallory, the anchoring main character in the plot of Alistair Maclean’s novel The Guns of Navarone, is a Kelly green character.

Now, that, of course, is not a mere Irish association, although Mallory is probably an Irish name. The color, for me, smacks of military discipline, resilience, irrepressible life and hope, and responsibility. Captain Mallory is not the leader of the commando raid on the impossibly secure anti-ship gun site on the island of Navarone, but leadership is thrust upon him when Major Franklin is injured climbing the cliff towards the guns. He is forced to adapt and make incredibly hard choices, leaving Franklin behind to be cured of gangrene by the enemy while in possession of false information that Mallory intentionally made him believe, knowing it would be tortured out of him. He also must decide to execute the resistance girl who had been helping the commandos until it was revealed she was a plant and actually helping the Germans. He is a Kelly green character of life and hope because he finds a way to succeed in the mission and brings most of the group out of it alive, having struck a major blow to the Germans.

This essay is not about Gregory Peck, though he is in all the pictures. I am merely using him to illustrate the idea that characters in fiction have different colors for me. He is a very good actor to be able to change color so easily. But the colors represent for me the kinds and qualities of the characters. I know it is not an entirely rational thing. But like the synesthesia effects on the days of the week, the colors perceived by my irrational Mickey-brain for fictional characters mean something to me, and I am attempting to explain in the best way that an irrational Mickey can.

I transformed into a nudist in the sixth decade of my little life. It was not a sudden thing. It was a slow-moving freight train that built up momentum for a long, long time, and was basically unstoppable as it reached the wall of decision. I plowed through that and now find myself attached to a writers group who write nudist novels.

My Twitter nudist friends have now actually discovered my novel with the nudist Cobble Sisters in it, Recipes for Gingerbread Children. And they liked it. They invited me to become a “writer of stories without clothes” and take part in their nudist literature group. I accepted. Somebody is actually reading and reviewing my novel, even if it is a review posted on Amazon.uk. I have had memberships for a while now with nudist websites that are very artist and story-teller friendly. Here is a link to a couple of them to tempt and horrify you.

https://www.clothesfreelife.com

https://www.truenudists.com

I have long been interested in nudism/naturism. The feeling of being naked in the great sunshiny outdoors has always appealed to me. I have practiced it every chance I was given from the time I was a boy skinny-dipping in Duffy’s Creek or playing jungle boy in Bingham Park Woods. I always did that alone and in secret though. I was always thoroughly terrified of being caught in the act by the older boy who abused me. I imagined him being everywhere. But that never happened again after that one horrible day. And it became a carefully guarded secret. I loved certain books like Kipling’s First Jungle Book where Mowgli is naked and unafraid in the deadly jungle where a tiger stalked him, or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn where Huck and Jim spend time nude on the raft in the Mississippi leaving their considerable cares and clothing aside, or Golding’s Lord of the Flies where nearly naked Ralph must run to keep from literally losing his head to the naked savages all the other boys have become.

And in many ways that has always been the theme of my flirtations with nudism. The attraction to it was nothing sexual. Rather, it was always about facing a dangerous world without any kind of armor.

And I can honestly say that is a large part of what makes me a writer, too. When you write fiction that actually tells the truth about life as you see it, you are facing a dangerous world of critical readers with no emotional armor on. Your soul is opened up to a world of people you will never actually meet who will judge your naked self without mercy.

But, I have not as yet actually revealed myself as a nudist with evidence to back that up. I have shown you a drawing of me as a boy in Iowa, nude, but only a drawing. I have shown you an artfully cropped picture of me partially nude in which I was actually wearing pants. Am I not a hypocrite and a coward if I don’t show you the real thing? (If the idea frightens you too much, you don’t have to look.) But here is the real nudism thing, actually nude, warts and sores and all.