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Yes, I published the book that has all my closet skeletons in it. I kept the secret of being a victim of a sexual assault from the age of ten to the age of thirty before finally sharing my pain with a girlfriend as described in the book. I tell about my entire transformation of someone totally shamed by my body to someone who embraced being a nudist. So, I have reasons for publishing this book.

1. I needed to get the worst of the secrets that chewed on my innards for over fifty years out of the closet to do their informative skeleton dance for any who might need to hear it. My mother and father both died without ever knowing what happened to me as a child. In 2020 and 2021 And not because I hadn’t revealed it to anyone. My sisters both knew. But they didn’t read my books and they really didn’t need to face that sadness since I had dealt with it myself years before.

2. I have collected many artworks that I have done over the years with my fascination with the nude human form revealed in it. I needed to air out some of that art. I got the added benefit of digital art coming along to help me translate my pictures into more realistic and dynamic art, unaffected by my arthritis.

3. I needed a place to put more of my truly terrible poetry. This book is a place to put some of what I have learned about blank verse by my fascination and obsession with Walt Whitman.

I talk about Walt Whitman, other artists and writers, and my personal philosophy of education here.

4. This book was also a place to experiment with AI tools and digital art in ways I had never done before. This picture above is created with a photo of a boy with clothes on, some drawing on top of it to change the face and alter the details necessary to make him a nude figure. Of course, my arthritis left numerous flubs and smirches all over it, so I used the AI Mirror program to turn the whole thing into a much better version with the colors better blended and the awkward lines smoothed out. I have to admit, though, the correctable lines and color swatches go down more easily than colored pencil lines. See the differences in quality in the arthritic version below, uncorrected by the AI editor?

5. And the most important reason of all is that this book purges my soul and gives me peace to face the last years of my life with. I am old enough to seriously think about how I want to face the end of everything for me. And what I really wanted to do is go into the coming night bare of all secrets and mental baggage. Just like any good nudist, I am hiding nothing at all as I stride to the end of the story..

I am tempting fate and trying to publish this, my personal nudist’s guide to repairing your soul through naked meditation and transcendental experiences. It is filled with lots of bad poetry, secrets that are actually quite painful for me to reveal, and almost all of the naked pictures that I have been drawing for years and was able to spruce up with an AI program.

Nudes like this one were created from photos where the model actually wore clothing, then I painted all over it with my electronic stylus on my touch-screen phone and then cleaned it all up with an AI photo editor. I gave credit to the AI, the digital art tools, and the masterpieces of art I imitated and learned from.

It still has to be approved by the small gods of Amazon KDP. It is possible it will get rejected and my Amazon account will be dropped. That would be catastrophic. For me, at any rate. But I have reviewed much worse on Amazon Kindle. And my novels have survived some severe complaints.

Time will tell. It will be available through a link on this blog if I get lucky.

I had to illustrate this post with pictures of a pretty brown-eyed girl to take your mind off the fact that this is a complainer post. Yes, the Republican Party has ticked me off. In other words, they have become a huge blood-sucking tick that I need to get off my chest and away from my heart.

Complaint number one; Those monkey-flingers have probably killed us. Climate change is slated to kill all life on Earth in fifty years. And they are busy protecting their profit-making by polluting more than ever while they still have fossil fuels to make money with. And they are going to shut the government down if huge cuts aren’t made to programs that help people like me, my family, all the people in my neighborhood, and all the people in the middle class and below while protecting the trillions of dollars in tax cuts that have a majority of all wealth flowing into the bottomless pockets of the ultra-greedy one-percenters.

We really only have until 2032 to solve the climate crisis. And the stupid MAGA minions refuse to believe in the fact of human-created climate change as reported, checked, updated, and verified by the international scientific community nearly every year since the 1970s. NASA, British and French climate studies, the US military resources, and independent scientific studies and data collectors throughout the globe, though peer-reviewed constantly, are all not believable because somebody on Fox News or Mark Levin or Tucker Carlson says all their studies and charts and tables and books are all lies. They have obviously done their own research by accepting fish food from the usual fishermen. Never mind the fatal fishhooks.

And if we are going to survive the climate crisis, we need to build hurricane-proof domed cities, de-acidify the oceans of the world, and relocate people forced out of the tropical climates that have become too hot for trees, animals, and people to stay alive. We not only have to stop putting more carbon dioxide and methane gas into the atmosphere, but we also have to take much of what’s up there in the air out again, sequestering carbon in forests, jungles, and back underground. And we have the technology to do all of these things, but we do not have time to squander.

And the Republicans will kill all of us by continuing to waste government time with impeachments of Biden that have no evidence of anything improper or illegal, and spending cuts that will derail the climate mitigation strategies I pointed out we are already behind on building. They have fired their Speaker of the House, dissolved into arguing groups of monkey-flingers, refused to fund the government which will lead to a shutdown, and they are still determined to foist the spoiled-mango ex-president criminal with the corn-tassel wig back into the White House. We are all going to die.

Complaint number two; Those mangy firetruckers without the “iretr” are also doing the one thing that most alienates me in all the world. They are banning books.

The thing is, those MAGA-minded Republicans, the low-information ones especially, are thoroughly convinced that they are better than the people they hate. And they think they have the right to tell others what rules they must obey and thoughts they must think even those imperial edicts don’t apply to them… because they don’t know what “edict” means.

What they do know the meaning of are the words “black,” “Jew,” and “gay,” and they associate all those words with a special fear and hatred. They also DON’T know the meanings of “woke,” “cultural elite,” and “gender.” Loud and sometimes violent parent groups go to special school board protest meetings to get books banned from the school libraries like the works of James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, and Walter Dean Myers because they are black, Biographies of Roberto Clemente and Rosa Parks for the same reason, books about the Holocaust and the origins of Hollywood because they tell the truth about Jews in America and the wider world, and true stories about gay penguin pairs raising a chick or young boys who like to wear skirts. The loud and sometimes violent parents who want to shield their children from any such scary truths are also depriving children of access to books like that even if I like them and, as a teacher, think those books are good for kids. To Kill a Mockingbird, The Roberto Clemente Story, Beloved by Toni Morrison, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, and the Biography of Harvey Milk have all been banned in Florida and Texas.

What right do people who most likely don’t even read books have to tell anyone else or anyone else’s children what they can and can’t read? Ron DeSantis, Greg Abbott, Ben Shapiro, Dennis Praeger, and Jordan Petersen certainly shouldn’t have any say in the matter. The Nazis in Germany burned books in the city squares of most German cities as Adolf Hitler came to power. Are we on the verge of burning books and red States and welcoming the new Fuhrer Donald Adolf Trumpkin Twitler back to the greatest seat of power on this planet again?

I apologize for ranting. But I am old enough now that my old and angry coot-brain comes to a boil easily and MAGA incompetence, corruption, and evil have raised the heat level of the entire world.

Ariel’s arresting blue eyes.

Little Babe;s Bikini

She used to vote Republican.

Before they got so cruel.

But she won’t vote a Democrat,

‘Cause rich guys have her fooled.

She’ll lasso any guy she likes,

“Cause her beauty lets her rule.

A cowgirl really loves her horse,

And bareback riding’s cool.

Aha! Another really terrible poem by that awful poet Mickey!!!

Not exactly like Princess Leia. But a very B-movie vibe here.

A Space Princess can be an alien like this little Nebulon Princess.

An adventuring Space Princess would need to keep a low profile as she travels from planet to planet.

There are more emotional tells in the face of this character than you can put into words to describe. You know it’s true. You just have to look. She lost her father when she was eleven. He committed suicide with a gun. She saw him before the police cleaned up the scene of his final act. But everyone tells her that she’s the most beautiful girl that ever lived in her little town. And she doesn’t believe them. But no other kid in town does a better job of taking care of everyone in times of crisis. She can bring people together. And she probably knows more about love than anyone you ever met. You see it in her eyes. You know that it is true.

Maybe I can capture it in a drawing. Maybe I cannot. Not even with digital art tools and help from the AI Mirror app. But doubting my skills is one of the tells that I really am an artist. What I can draw in spite of arthritis in my hands and loss of some percent of my color vision also proves that I am an artist. I do it even with the painful obstacles that must be overcome.

And I can certainly overdo it and make big mistakes. But I know from the Bob Ross Bible that there are no mistakes. Only happy little accidents.

When I was a kid in Iowa in the 1960’s Saturday morning television was the singular source of fuel for the imagination.  I loved the various adventure cartoons.  Jonny Quest, Space Ghost, Thundarr the Barbarian, and the Herculoids were the source of endless lets-pretend games in Granpa’s grove and in the old barn.

I suppose the characters I envisioned myself being the most often were Zandor and his son Dorno.  These two practically naked people lived on a primitive planet that had to constantly be defended from space-faring invaders and free-booters that had ray-gun technology on their side.  The only weapons that the practically naked barbarians were able to use against the villains were exploding rocks that were shot out of a slingshot by Zandor and Dorno and Tara, or out of the horn-gun on the head of Tundro the living tank-beast with too many legs.  Of course, Igoo the giant rock ape could bop ’em with his big stone fists, or Zok the lightning dragon, could zap them with tail and eye lasers.  And Gloop and Gleep, the living Play-Doh blobs, could also always shape themselves into flyswatters or springs or wet blankets, or… well, you have to see it to really get it.

I learned valuable lessons from watching the Herculoids and then pretending to be them.  First of all, I learned that back-to-nature, practically-naked barbarians were morally superior to those who solve their problems with technology.  I also learned that you can win fights with exploding rocks and yelling, “Zandor!  Look out!” at the right time over computerized flying robots with lasers and disintegration rays. There was also the thing about never knowing when an old Space Ghost villain like Brakk or Moltarr was going to show up, and you needed to be ready to defeat them by doing the same things to them that Space Ghost had done to them in previous episodes.  And for some reason, bad guys come with a psychological need to capture Tara or Dorno or both Tara and Dorno and put them in cages.

I hope there was nothing psycho-sexual embedded in those old episodes.  That would be a terrible thing to do to an impressionable young boy who loved to watch the cartoons.  Explain to me again, Alex Toth and Hanna Barbera,  why are Zandor, Dorno, and Tara practically naked all the time?  Oh, yes, it was a tropical planet.  It must have been hot there.

Anyway, I must end this homage now, before I start analyzing how this somewhat bizarre cartoon actually affected me as a child.  I loved the Herculoids.  I still love them… no matter how goofy and weird they are.

 

She’s a powerful swordswoman who happens to be from a humanoid race on a distant planet where everyone’s skin is lavender in color.

She’s a powerful Psion, Telepathy and Telekinesis. She also has absolutely no fashion sense.

These are characters who may possibly appear in the Cissy Moonskipper series of Sci-Fi novellas. Neither one has a decent star-warrior-type name. Feel free to leave suggestions in the comments.

Some songs are so beautiful and so true, that I cannot listen without tears in my eyes and burning fire in my heart.

“I did my best, it wasn’t much

I couldn‘t feel, so I tried to touch

I’ve told the truth, I didn’t come to fool you

And even though it all went wrong

I’ll stand before the lord of song

With nothing on my tongue but hallelujah”

lyrics from “Hallelujah” by Leonard Cohen

You see, I believe in God… but my God is a bit bigger than most people’s God.  In fact, most of the people who come closest to what I believe are atheists.  My God is all of existence, the good and the bad both.  He is above my understanding, but it is my place to constantly try to reach for Him and know Him and, sometimes, even be Him.  Things that are impossible to accomplish, and yet we all do it on a daily basis.

My God does not punish sin.  My God does not reward faith.  My God does not ask anything of me beyond being.  But since I exist, and since I believe that love and beauty are good things, if I want the universe around me to manifest love and beauty, then I must make it so.  I must live as a loving person and a singer of beautiful songs… even if I can only sing silently in words on a page.

However did someone as dopey as me come up with something as dopey as this?  Let me tell you a story.

When I was ten, an older boy, a neighbor, trapped me, de-pants me, and abused me.  It was not love in any way.  It was sexualized torture.  He made me feel pain.  He took away my sense of well-being.  He made me afraid to touch or be touched by others.  He made me believe my own physical urges were a terrible thing that God would punish me for.  I wet my pants in school more than once, because I feared the boys’ bathroom at school.  I no longer tried so hard to make the other kids laugh.  I sank into depression.  And ultimately, I thought about ending myself in painful ways, ways I felt I deserved.

But I was blessed.  My best friend’s father was the minister of the Methodist Church and, eventually, both churches in our little town.  And in the late 60’s, the Methodists decided to be very progressive on matters of human sexuality.  When I was twelve, he taught all the kids in my age group about sex using a blackboard and a willingness to frankly discuss anything we needed to know.  Of course, he never quite figured out what my terrible secret was, in fact, I couldn’t have told him about it if I wanted to, the memory was repressed and I couldn’t call it up until that day in college when it all came back to me at age 22.  But he knew it was there.  He is the one that taught me that faith in God is about love.  It is not about punishment, especially not punishment for biological urges and physical needs.  People need love, and should never be castigated or humiliated because they seek it.  And he told me that I was not to blame for the acts of others.  The notion of original sin, that we are all born despicable because Adam goofed, is nonsense.  All people, even the bad ones, are God’s children and worthy of love.  People can be redeemed from anything.  And it is the job of worthy people to be the love that informs the universe.  We must do good deeds and love, honor, and, most of all, render aid to others.  Because that fills the universe with goodness and light.

Both the good Reverend Aiken and my abuser are dead now.  I deeply love one, and I forgive the other.  And it’s because that’s what God is… love and forgiveness.  It has to be so.

Did you listen to that song from YouTube?  If you made it this far through this rather difficult ramble without listening to it, I recommend you click on it and give it a try.  It is about King David sinning with Bathsheba, and repenting his sin before God.  And in the end, there was no punishment for him.  So, I, too stand before the lord of song with nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah.