On a track made with Picsart AI Photo Editor, the racing nudist.
An edited racer made with my original drawing and AI Mirror.
The racer becomes a skinny-dipper.
My original pen-and-ink drawing was made with colored pencils.
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The Inner Clown
Sometimes it is entirely necessary to acknowledge the fool and the helpless, hopeless clown that lives inside us all. Okay, I hear what you are thinking. Not you. There is no clown inside of you… only me. That is one of a myriad of mistakes that makes me acknowledge that I am far short of perfection. I am not a know-it-all. I am a know-it-sometimes who too often tries to bluster his way through like he isn’t completely unsure of himself and terrified that other people will see what he truly is and laugh him out of business. I am a pratfall, butt-of-the-joke, snicker-at-snidely sort of buffoon who never gets it right and deserves every guffaw thrown at him. Clowns are often all blue, squishy, and sad on the inside. That is often the only thing that makes us funny. Do you know what brought on this wave of self pity? Of course you do. No man ever went through a day of stumble-muffs and misquotes, goof-ups and stubbed toes like I did without feeling at least a little bit that way. Oh? Not you, again? I hear you. It must be nice to never make mistakes. 
I have my car registered with the wrong registration sticker. When I tried to get the State inspection done, I found out my car is now supposed to be the old van my wife destroyed in a car accident last spring. My bank’s bill-pay service has twice sent money to the electric company which somehow lost the electronic check. I can’t even handle idiot-proof details anymore. My son who was home on leave went back to the Marine Corps early this morning. I took him to the airport and had to bring all his deodorant spray, shampoo, and toothpaste back home with me because soap on an airplane equals terrorist. Apparently, that should’ve all gone into the bags we checked, because that stuff only explodes in the carry-on bags, never the baggage compartment. I am called out for my many writing mistakes, even the ones I made on purpose trying to be funny, and my self-editor let me down on several occasions in the past week. So I am depressed. At life I am, at best, a .125 hitter, barely making more than one hit in every ten at-bats. I am a rodeo clown trying to play in a basketball game, and the bulls are all Michael Jordan. (How’s that for a mangled metaphor?) 
But it isn’t all the blues that I am singing. Good things have happened too. Life continues in my unlikely body afflicted with six incurable diseases, and I am a cancer survivor since 1983. The golf-ball sized growth the surgeon removed from the back of my head last week was benign, no sign of cancer. My son was home on leave. Every day is it’s own miracle. And I have gotten some writing done. So what if every editor and every reader doesn’t fall in love with every single word? The story goes on for at least another day.
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What Little Wisdom There is in This
I am at the very end of a long life with a complete 31-year teaching career, childhood trauma, three kids when who are now adults, an interest in knowing about the answers to both mysteries and ordinary things, and an imagination so vivid I have to wonder how much of all of that is real. Like Socrates, I don’t really know anything. Everything I have in my head that is even remotely akin to wisdom is based on observation and experiment, wrapped up with Reason, and boiled in a broth of Skepticism. I am well aware that imagination can skew everything if you let it.
Here’s something I believe to be true based on experience and evidence;
Lucid dreaming is a real thing that some people do. I have done it numerous times. It simply means becoming aware that you are actually dreaming in the course of the dream. You can then take total control of the dream. Most of the dreams I have had like this involve flying without an airplane. I have also had a dream of running naked through the old grade-school building where I went through grades K through 6. Everyone was laughing at me, but I took control and made all my classmates run naked with me, even the girls I never saw naked in real life.
I have also experienced a Close Encounter of the Third Kind although I strongly believe that, even though the aliens were exactly like the ones that Whitley Streiber described in his book, Communion, it was really only a very vivid dream. I have learned about such dreams over time that many of them are the result of childhood trauma, like the trauma of being sexually assaulted by a sadist, which happened to me at the age of ten. Many of these so-called alien abductions, then, are no more than vivid trauma dreams that under hypnosis get recalled as reality. I have also had trauma dreams about tornados caused by the Belmond Tornado of 1969, a night I spent fearing that my parents were dead. These dreams can seem so real that you can feel the wind on your dream face or a campfire warming your bare feet outdoors at night. I am pretty sure that my encounter with gray aliens from Zeta Reticuli was like that. The fear it gave me up and down my spine was the ghost of the fear my assailant gave me when I was ten.
Dreams can also Predict the Future. This I believe due to a large number of strange experiences. My tornado dreams often come right before a major tragedy like one of my car accidents, or my Great Grandma Hinckley’s death. One night in college I dreamt of my childhood friend Bobby falling out of the back of a blue pickup truck. Less than a week later I was told in the family phone call that Robert had actually been hospitalized when he fell out of a truck. And the pickup was allegedly blue. I also dreamed of being in the home of another of my high school friends where a number of his relatives were gathered to mourn the loss of his stepfather. It was a Friday night dream. The following Monday at school I learned all about his stepfather’s Friday night motorcycle accident. Eerily, some of the relatives I saw in that dream were people I only later learned were his relatives.
Of course, you cannot change the outcomes of things by a prediction-based dream. And none of this nonsense may actually be true due to the random nature of real life and the faultiness of my own stupid perceptions in my own stupid head. So, I can’t really know these things. I may have all the conclusions wrong. But the best wisdom I have to offer here is… well, it all MAY BE TRUE.
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Mickey’s Current Halloween
Is that the Grim Reaper knocking at my door?
My body is nearly 70 years old.
With all my incurable diseases and conditions, it sometimes seems more than 100.
But my mind is still twelve.
I was fully prepared to meet death today. I thought it might happen because of the driving I needed to do on top of the passing out I had been doing for no identified reason.
But my daughter took care of the night driving on the drive home. And no passing out.
I have been struggling to draw and write anything.
My blog readership fell off a cliff this month. I suppose because I have been writing about nudists more and probably being mentally weird and indecipherable due to old-man craziness.
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How an All-Nude Middle School Could Help the Different Species of Middle School Monkeys
I have often described the typical middle school with the name “The Monkey House” due to the resemblance in the behavior of sixth graders to little monkeys like squirrel monkeys, capuchins, and rhesus monkeys, and the behavior of seventh graders to chattering chimpanzees, and the behavior of eighth graders to poop-throwing gorillas. All of these simian varieties in nature do not wear any clothes. So, it follows that in nature, middle school students would naturally be at least metaphorically naked. They do swing with their tails out of their seats at any excuse, chatter about personal things without realizing others might be listening, and fling metaphorical poop at everyone… literal poop in certain regrettable situations. But every human species of middle-school monkeys in the Monkey House could benefit from being as naked in school as actual monkeys are in the jungle. In this post, I will try to cover how that works in an imaginary all-nude school for each of as many monkey species as I can.
I am starting with the nude nerds because, had I been put in an all-nude experimental middle school myself, I would have been a member of this middle-school monkey species. I would have been like Milton, always carrying nearly every book from my locker so I would have something to hold in front of me, hiding my little weiner as well as I could. Nerds know a lot more about everything than the other monkeys. And as a result, they are more aware of everything. Especially aware of how genitals react to the sight of nude bodies of either or both sexes. They are subject to death by embarrassment loSnarkng after the other monkeys have become desensitized.
The shrinking violets, mostly of the female persuasion, would benefit a lot from being nudists in a school full of naked people. Shrinking violets are kids who would turn invisible if they could. But as the nudist experience goes on, they would soon discover you blend in more by just being comfortably naked than you would by folding yourself into basketball shapes and trying to get smaller. The last shrinking violets to remove their hands from in front of their private places would be laughed at the hardest by the first shrinking violets to realize they are less seen as a part of the crowd than they are as part of the strange little people tying themselves in knots to become invisible.
Snarks are equally distributed between the male and female varieties. They have mostly grown into their snarkiness, not being snarks as the littlest monkeys, but blossoming with total snarkification as they grow into the chimpanzee and then gorilla stages. A snark becomes snarky in the presence of the bullies or the criminals. It begins as a survival method, saying something witty but mean to redirect the bully or criminal’s attention to nude nerds, shrinking violets, Boy Scouts, or the plain normals when the bully or criminal turns their attention to them. Sometimes they turn from snark into bully, but only if they are not clever enough to achieve the title of Class Clown. A Class Clown is a snark who is actually funny and even makes the teacher laugh. That’s why they sometimes become standup comedians later in life. A naked snark must sharpen comedic skills in an all-nude school. Naked you lose the opportunity to joke about bulges in boy’s pants, peed-your-pants jokes, poop jokes, and funny-clothing jokes. Plus, your personal privacy is no longer in need of defense. Everyone can see if you are circumcised or have hair down there.
Plain normals should be the majority of the students in any school, but the truth is, none of them are actually even remotely normal. They all have their own weird quirks, talents, phobias, and terrible secrets. But this category serves to prevent having to break things down into as many categories as you have students. Cheerleaders are either a group or an affliction. Girls who suffer from cheerleaderpepitis are easily turned into snarks, puppy mothers, or even bullies and criminals. Too much energy, sex appeal, and ambition are dangerous things to put in the hands (and bodies) of people who are not that far advanced from becoming fully potty-trained. Being fully nude brings noses down out of the air a little bit. Jocks are still jocks at a nudist school since the thing that names them is a vital form of protection in sports. Brainless bums, ugos, angels, and future supermodels could be a part of any group I have named so far. So, the thing that helps them all in a nudist middle school is the fact that nudity as a school uniform makes them all equal in one very visible way.
Boy Scouts, once known as future Republicans, and still known to be the first to volunteer, hall monitoring, teachers’ helpers, and honor students, are the group least affected by a change to an all-nude dress code. Theirs is a behavioral distinction. They are the students who crave first place in everything. And, of course, girls make excellent Boy Scouts, being cleaner than actual boys. You can’t just call them Girl Scouts because that is a uniform, not a behavior. Boy Scouts are also more adaptable than the other students and will be the first ones to embrace nudity on the first day of school.
The last monkeys I will discuss here are potentially gorillas in all ways that matter. The bullies and criminals inhabit the same corners of every school, and rare is the criminal who hasn’t been a bully first. They are either much bigger and stronger than the other kids or much smarter. Their morals are mostly skewed by things outside the school. So the main benefit of having them in school naked is that they can’t hide knives, guns, drugs, or other evil contraband on their own person. Nothing stops a bully from verbally intimidating others or using fists. But bruises on victims are more visible and it is harder for a naked kid to look dangerous when they are limited to their birthday suits.
As I pointed out previously, there are other definable types of monkeys in the monkey house, but how being in an experimental all-nude middle school would benefit and affect them is basically covered now as far as I can figure out. I am a rather old and stupid orangutan myself, now that I am retired from teaching for a decade. And I am now senile enough to write about stuff like doing middle-school education naked. So, there’s that.
The Story is Never Safe
When you are a writer, you look for conflict constantly. It is a fact of the writing life that stories need conflict to drive them forward, whether they are non-fiction reports, biographies, or histories, or they are fiction stories full of made-up people and made-up events. But we are in a time in history where the conflict in real life is hitting everywhere. No place, in reality, is safe.
What do I mean about there being no real-life safety?
Well, barring a technological magic bullet and a complete revolution in the way corrupt capitalists do politics, the Earth will probably become a lifeless hot rock more like the surface of the planet Venus than any kind of Edenic utopia. If the Republicans take back power next month, kiss goodbye the human race in any form but zoo animals in alien zoos on other worlds.
And Nancy Pelosi’s husband was attacked in the head with a hammer because of Don Cheetoh Trumpaloney’s Neanderthal political practices. Men in camo and bullet-proof vests watch polling places to presumably threaten non-white, non-Trumpy voters. Republicans are probably out-voting Democrats, thus sealing our fate. Republicans choose profits for themselves over life on Earth.
I, of course, am no more safe than anybody else. In some ways, as a writer of fiction, I am less safe than the rest of you. My imagination gives me near prescience about the bad things that can happen to me. And I write fiction about love and forgiveness and a sense of community good in solving the chaotic conflicts of life, All you have to do is get naked, figuratively and in reality both, in order to combat the dangerous world around you. But, of course, it means you have no sort of armor at all to protect you from the wounds of life’s many predators.
This last week, I faced a predator like that, in the form of a marketing service wanting to make my book Catch a Falling Star available at a library conference in New Orleans. Of course, only for the slight fee of $850.00. Now, it goes without saying, I could really use exposure like this to help sell my books. But the price is far more than I would ever recoup from royalties. And the salesman tried to hurry my decision. He offered to talk to his manager about giving me three payment installments, a used-car-dealer tactic. And he urged me to sign up before he would give me a chance to google his company, his emails, and his Better-Business-Bureau rating. He had no mercy for the fact that his efforts to keep me talking caused me to have a coughing fit. I ended the ordeal by hanging up on him. I did not answer when he called me back.
The world is ending. I am living in a house that threatens to fall upon my head at any moment. And two book-marketing schemers have now contacted me, one to scam me out of my publishing rights, and another trying to get a lot of my money for very little real value.
How will this story end? I have yet to learn how the conflict will be resolved. But I know it will not be safe.
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Naked Metaphors
Yes, he’s at it again. Silly old Mickey in his birthday suit is writing metaphorically about nudity, nakedness, and naturism. The gross old coot has to do something to survive the Texas heat.
You are probably thinking, and rightly so, that since the crazy old bird was a school teacher for 31 years, and a school student for 18 years before that to become one, he’d be a bit more circumspect about his teacher-honor than to be going around promoting public nudity on his silly little blog again. And you’d be right. This society we now live in doesn’t seem like it is going to approve public nudity generally anytime soon. Most places around the USA make it illegal to go outside your house in nothing but the skin you were born in. You can be arrested for public indecency. Especially if you are ugly when you are naked.
You know it didn’t used to be that way. The ancient Greeks were wild about public nudity. It was the rule for competing in the Olympics and doing business in the agora in the downtown of every Greek metropolis. In fact, the schools that ancient-Greek Mickey would have taught in required the students to be naked for half the day at the very least as they attended school. Of course, those laws only applied to boys. Nobody really wanted to see a naked girl back then. Unless she was made of marble and depicted Aphrodite. They were wild about her naked carcass.
But Mickey learned that being a teacher in the 20th and 21st Century schools of Texas was all about being metaphorically naked.
It’s true. College speech teachers would tell you that, to overcome stage fright on the first day of class, you needed to imagine your students were naked to put yourself at ease, feeling superior because you were dressed and they were not.
But Mickey looked out at those classes of 25 to 30 students, unwashed, feral, and completely hormone-fueled, and realized they really were naked… metaphorically. Even with what passed for clothing on their sweaty little monster bodies, you could still see every naked fault, attitude, indiscretion, and sometimes beauty about them, even when packed in layers with a snowsuit on top. But it never snowed in South Texas back then anyway. They were as good as naked all the time. You could literally see which ones were evil, which were shrinking violets, which were hungry predators, and which ones were imagining the teacher naked to swing the advantage over to themselves.
And teaching entire classrooms full of naked twelve-to-seventeen-year-olds, you learned to understand what their needs really were. You could see their naked shame at not being able to read as well as the smart girls in class. You could see which ones were bullied in school and probably belittled even at home. And you learned to love them… even the bad ones… in a non-inappropriate way. Teacher love. Because they were naked. Metaphorically. At least, that’s what stupid Mickey thought.
And being metaphorically naked means many things at once. In their unarmored form, naked people are vulnerable. They are also not hiding anything under disguises or costumes that make you think they are something they are not. That leather jacket on that metaphorically naked little boy doesn’t hide the fact that he’s insecure about his male peers thinking he is only acting tough because he’s trying to hide the fact that he may be gay. Or that naked little girl in the tight blue jeans and shirt two sizes too small is afraid that she will never find love amongst the male orangutans and gorillas she is most fascinated by.
And naked angels in European art in the Middle Ages symbolized metaphorically, purity and innocence. And some of the naked angels in Mickey’s classes were also metaphorically innocent, no matter how many times they may have goofed up and lost a bit of their innocence.
And they are especially metaphorically naked when they write in their journals, something Mickey made them do at least three days out of five every week. Mickey told them he would read them when he graded them, that they only had to get the two hundred words written in each entry to get an easy 100 percent. And Mickey emphasized that he would read them and not tell anybody else about what they wrote unless they volunteered to have the best stuff read out loud. And, boy howdy! When they told Mickey what they wanted him to know about their naked little lives, it was often stuff that could embarrass Marine Corps drill sergeants, longshoremen, and undercover vice cops. Extremely naked information… metaphorically.
And so, stupid Mickey thought that, just maybe… being metaphorically naked might be good for you. Cathartic and cleansing. And freeing in a way that can only be appreciated by someone who has long been repressed and imprisoned by lingering trauma and fear like Mickey secretly knew something about. Yes, the difference between being metaphorically and literally naked was not very great at all.
And you know what that meant a stupid Mickey was going to think.
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A Song of the Forest Faun
It is a sad song playing in the imaginary forest where my mind lives.
My wife doesn’t love me. She keeps me around to pay for stuff. But she rarely talks to me anymore and she never is nice to me. True, she’s not as mean as she was. But still rather mean.
I dedicated my life to education. I learned to teach students critical thinking skills. I taught students who did not speak English as well as they spoke Spanish, Vietnamese, or Mandarin Chinese to read and write in English. But schools are woefully underfunded now, especially if they are city public schools and teacher shortages exist because States like Texas don’t respect them as people, don’t pay them well, or assign them to jobs that can’t actually be done by one lone, dedicated teacher. And I am not well enough to help out with my teaching skills any longer.
Donald Trump may win back the Presidency again. I suffered under his administration, not benefitting from his massive tax cut, but rather, having to pay more than a thousand dollars extra each year since he raised my tax on my pension by over a hundred dollars a month and made me pay that extra hundred for every month in 2017. Trump is proof that the government only aids the greedy, rich bastards who buy what they want for laws that benefit only them, never the poor or the middle class.
I enjoy being a nudist outdoors in the sunshine and fresh air, but can no longer practice it because I am on medication that makes me susceptible to sunlight, like some kind of vampire.
Radasha, the faun, plays his recorder in the green wood that exists only in my stupid head. It is made up of many beautiful melodies packed with somber tones and tragic, trailing riffs. the music of the afternoon of a tired old faun.
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I Voted
Today my daughter and I went to the library and voted for Democrats. We voted for Kamala Harris for President, and more importantly… we voted AGAINST Trump. We voted for Colin Allred for Senator, the former NFL player, and more importantly… we voted AGAINST Ted Cruz. I don’t know how my daughter handled the rest of the ballot, by I voted for all the Democrats on the ballot, and none of the Republicans or Libertarians.
The thing is… the Republicans will probably win, especially in Texas. But MAGA Republicans are evil. They cheat and will probably win because of it. The last time I voted against Ted Cruz, I could swear that when my ballot was scanned and flashed on the screen, it changed my vote for Beto O’Rorke into a vote for Ted Cruz. He’s a lizard-man from the center of the Earth, and probably also the Zodiac Killer. And Moldy Mango Trump is a convicted felon still allowed to run for President and somehow immune to prosecution for any crimes committed while he’s President. Satan is slowly taking over as he did in the late 1930s.
To deal with all the stress I drew a naked cat-boy. I know… but it isn’t as evil as what the Republicans do.
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Breakfast with Dr. Faustus
Dr. Faustus is a nudist. But that morning he was wearing clothes, standing at the stove frying eggs sunnyside up in one pan, bacon strips in another, and hash browns in the third. I was sitting at the table, the sunshine streaming in through the glass sliding door to his backyard and warming me, lighting up the red and white checkered tablecloth at the same time.
As the mouthwatering smells filled the kitchen with signals that the food was ready, his grandson came barreling through the sliding door. Naked nine-year-old boys are normally kind of gross and horrible, but this kid was an exception to the rule. He was charming and beautifully attractive as a sweet, innocent child—a grandchild that I did not have myself, and I felt slightly jealous of the good doctor because of him.
“Smells good, Grandpa,” said Timothy. “Hi, Uncle Mickey. How come you guys aren’t naked?”
“Hello, Tim,” I said sheepishly.
“Mr. Beyer isn’t going to be here for a long time. And I don’t want to get burned by frying grease. Grab a plate and come here.”
Tim grabbed two plates and brought them to the stove.
“One egg, two bacon strips, and one spatula full of hash browns, Mike?”
“That’ll fit into my diabetic diet. Thanks.”
The good doctor plopped the food on the first plate and Tim brought it to me. Then Tim got his own plate filled and dashed out to the backyard again to eat in the sunshine.
“You’ve got a good one there, Erasmus. If you ever want to get rid of him… well…”
He brought his own plate to the table and sat down across from me. “You know, you could have everything you wanted in life if only you were willing to do what I did.”
“Sell my soul to the Devil, you mean?”
“Well, that’s one way to put it. But I mean focussing on your goals and reducing them to the few things you really want out of life. You basically work very hard to give everything you have away and spend all your time on benefitting others. You don’t keep things for yourself. You don’t build wealth for yourself. Being a teacher is a good example. You gave little pieces of yourself away to every kid. And for what? Most of them probably don’t remember a single thing you taught them. Just think of all the good you could do for yourself if you kept all of that for yourself.”
“Well, I don’t know…”
“For instance, the grandchild question. You told me that you tragically lost your first chance at a grandchild. Something most of your family doesn’t even know. And you also indicated how little your wife cares about anything but your money. As a teacher, you don’t have much of that to care about. What if you left her and found another woman who already has children and grandchildren. There are a lot of them out there looking for someone like you to complete them. You could remarry into a new family with grandchildren already a part of it all. Then you might have one to spend the day with just like me. It only takes putting your own wants and needs first.”
“I have a family. And it is not in my nature to try again before the first one has totally failed. My three kids love me. Sometimes my wife does too.”
“But people like you and I have a deeper understanding of the world. We know things that other people don’t know. We have the power to manipulate things. We can control things. We can take power.”
“The only power I have ever wanted is the power to help others.”
“That’s my point. You need to use that power to take things for your own benefit. Think of your little novel-writing business. You are a much better storyteller than you get credit for. You could, with the right amount of focused effort, actually make yourself rich and famous.”
“Not without spending money I don’t have. Not without a miracle.”
“You could very easily do it by spending other people’s money. How do you think billionaires do it? Use your God-given talents to make people invest in you.”
“We’re talking about Devil-given powers, aren’t we?”
“The self-sacrificing thing you rely on will be the end of you.”
“Yes. It probably will. I have lived in the darkness of suicidal self-hatred. I never want to go back there. As it is, if I die today, I will die happy with myself. I have done a hard job for a career and done it to the best of my ability. I have told a few good stories. I mean stories that I am satisfied with, my best work. And my family may not always treat me very well, but what matters more is how I treat them. I will not be burying any chicken bones at a crossroads. I will not sign away my soul to the Devil.”
He laughed. His eggs and bacon were excellent. I wondered what he got out of his deal. But I also knew he was joking as much as I was.
Dr. Faustus is a nudist. But he was wearing clothes that day. And he was also an entirely fictional character. So, don’t worry about him making deals with the Devil.
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Catch a Falling Star 