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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.

Reverend Aiken is the one in the cowboy hat.  His son, Mark, was my childhood best friend.

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.

I have many objects to keep up in the air.

So many, in fact, that it doesn’t seem fair.

Ah, the lovely anapest… to mesmerize annoying pests,

And render up to mighty Zeus, the laughs begot by Dr. Seuss.

It will not help me to succeed,

To laugh and smile at needy needs,

But objects dance and keep on flying,

Though of the truth, I’m sure I’m lying.

(I’ll bet you forgot how well I can write really terrible poetry!)

I have been working for the last six months on a book full of stuff about being naked and pictures I have drawn of naked people. It is soon going to be a hard decision. Do I risk my Amazon account publishing a book like that? And can I fail to publish some of my best writing and best artwork just because some people will think I’m a pervert and seek to punish me?

The above is the cover I intend to use if I prove to be brave enough and correspondingly stupid enough to publish it. But I do believe I have the courage based on the fact that I will soon be dead anyway. And I am definitely stupid when it comes to things like publishing.

Ariel is actually a three-foot-tall plastic doll, fully articulated, but restored after an unknown number of years of hard use. Unlike the porcelain dolls my mother made in a kiln, this one has actually been played with and shows wear and tear even after being restored with new pieces of skin, paint, and glue. The wig, eyelashes, and pajamas are all newly applied. I have promised her that she will be better cared for in her retirement from being played with. The thing is, though, photos of her are perfect for use as digital art practice.

This is the photo I used to draw the picture above it. You can see I figured out how to avoid copyrighted characters on the pajamas in the final product, in case anybody ever offers me money for such a picture.

Here’s another view of the face with that mysterious almost-smile captured to the best of my ability.

Here is another view of Ariel being sleepy, but with big blue eyes.

She can easily have a sad face, too. It only takes a few subtle tweaks.

I am worried about many things right now. I am finishing up an autobiographical book of artworks depicting the many different kinds of nudes I have drawn over the past fifty years. Some are updated to look almost real with AI Mirror assistance and editing with my touchscreen phone and electronic stylus. It is a book that is not pornographic but shows both male and female full-frontal nudity. It is a risky time to publish a book like that with the general book-banning fury going on in Texas, Florida, and other Bible-thumping Inquisitions going on in MAGA-conservative hotbeds.

The news from my KDP author’s dashboard has been surprising for the last two weeks. A couple of people at least have chosen to read some of my books on Kindle Unlimited. It is not the way things have happened in the past where books were only being read one at a time separated by empty weeks. In the last two weeks, more than 1,200 pages have been read, sometimes with three different books being read the same day. Total coincidence? Probably.

As you can see, I’ve also been spending considerable time making pictures. I have been using digital tools mostly on my old colored-pencil art, but also on pictures collected from the internet over the years in my picture file. It is refreshing to be able to draw again without having to work around permanent splotches and flubs caused by arthritis in my hands.

So, October is a spooky month, for Halloween reasons… And I bought a 14-inch doll’s skeletal remains in a local store. I decided to use this particular photo to make some creepy experimental stuff.

The fairy posing for me in the original photo began complaining as I operated on the image with both my computer stylus and my AI editing program called AI Mirror.

I thought maybe this was a little better. It still made Melodyhopper the Butterfly Child cry fairy tears.

Mel found this one better. “But it still makes me feel like Frankenstein’s Monster,” she said with a tear still in her eye. “Well, I like how it makes me look funny,” said Red Skeleton.

So, I finally settled on another portrait of my imaginary granddaughter, Susu.