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The picture shows you some of what I have been doing when my brain is too buzzy to write, and the news is too depressing. I don’t want to write incomprehensible nonsense. I also don’t want to spend all my time crying. So, I do what art I can with my color printer, printer paper, scissors, glue sticks, and cardboard from the recycle bin. Here you see Shirley Temple, a classic paper doll from the 1950’s, Annette Funicello, made from my own drawing of the Disney Princess, a couple of antique paper dolls you can buy the images of online with a mere $1.50, a Francine doll, nude with cardboard butterfly wings, a puppy my mother cut out from one of our children’s books in the 1950’s, and a mint-in-box Rena Rouge doll from the cartoon series Miraculous, bought at Walmart at an after-Christmas sale price.

But I have to say, the title doesn’t really speak to literal paper dolls. I am simply distracting myself from the horrors going on in Ukraine. They try to save their children by putting them in a theater with a sign on the roof proclaiming they are children sheltering inside, and then Putin targets them for bombing? I cannot deal with that. I treat dolls in my collection as if they were people. But elsewhere in the world they don’t treat people as if they were people? No. I can’t accept that.

Here’s a REALLY DISTRACTING paper doll.

I am sorry for leaving Betty naked. The paper-doll dresses are still being made. I am creating them from scratch, drawing them myself, and the colored ink has run out on the printer. But Betty gets to enjoy the naturist thing I have been promoting, and this doll is nude, not pornographic. There is a difference.

Except in the minds of certain prudish fundamentalist Christians.

I have, this past month, made a lot of paper dolls while watching stand-up comics on YouTube and Netflix. And it is because I can’t deal with the emotional pain the news from Ukraine causes me. Forgive me. I am a former teacher, and the senseless murder of Ukrainian children has pretty much kicked my slats in. My heart is in my shoes. I am in pain in ways I can’t even explain. My only hope is to distract myself by making paper dolls.

This last winter was tough on me. I had Covid for the second time in December. I see less well and feel less well now on a daily basis. I have been invited to appear on a writer’s panel at the AANR Southwest Convention at the Star Ranch in McDade, Texas this June. It would mean travelling down to the Austin area and camping at the nudist ranch for multiple days. And I fear I am not well enough to do such a thing by myself. (I can’t even ask my wife to go along. She would be against it for religious reasons. She loves camping, but does not want to see naked people.) I am honored to be asked. and I will look into the possibility. But I probably won’t be able to do it.

The fact that the sunshine has come back to Texas and the weather is warming means life is getting better for me. Honestly, the sunshine gives you natural Vitamin D which positively affects both mood and mental health. It is even easier to get that sunshiny happiness when you are a nudist, baring your hairy old hide to the kiss of Mother Sun.

Maybe I will get to go to that convention… I can hope, can’t I?

Life has generally become an intrinsically unfair and unequal exercise in struggling just to stay the same, let alone trying to better ourselves.

But wealthy white folks need their tax breaks to fatten the money piles they sit upon. Like well-fed dragons on their treasure hordes.

And the angel weeps.

Beloved by Toni Morrison has been banned in Florida. As has Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and a biography of Rosa Parks, and George Orwell’s 1984, and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, and many other books, including books about the Holocaust like Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize graphic novel Maus.

And wealthy white so-called Conservative Republicans have failed to conserve these books, and smile, because they have managed to exert control over what other people are allowed to read and think, because they believe they have the right to tell others what is true and what is evil because it’s Woke… whatever that means.

And the angel weeps.

And a ten-year-old girl who was raped and is pregnant with a baby that will probably kill her if it is carried to term has to flee to another distant State to get the abortion that saves her life because the Supreme Court took away the legal precedent that was supposed to protect her.

But wealthy white evangelical so-called Christians smugly laugh and sing praises to those who made this happen. They got what they wanted for 50 years. The right to save a life by making babies be carried to term no matter the consequences. Of course, they won’t lift a finger to help once the child is born, even if it is born into a family that can’t afford to feed it. In fact they want to take away food stamps because those people are just lazy and need to learn how to pick themselves up without help from anywhere… no matter how hard they work at McDonalds because you can’t get food stamps without at least a starvation-wages job.

And the angel weeps! Why does nobody care about that?

I often wonder what the future will think of me… or if they will even think of me at all. Even my family may not remember the real me, particularly those who haven’t read anything I have ever written. My mother passed away in 2021 never knowing that I was sexually assaulted when I was ten. She didn’t want to know anything like that. She didn’t read this blog. She didn’t read any of my novels. But that is mainly because she never read any blog posts or any novels… ever. She was a career RN and read all kinds of things about nursing, health, and medicine. She had thick books of pharmaceutical knowledge and looked up every medication ever prescribed to any member of her family. But my personal inner truth, the things that I have written that define me in my own terms and my own inner mythos, are all available to anyone who wants to read them. They are all available on Amazon. One on Barnes and Noble. And I give e-book copies away for free every month. But hardly anyone takes me up on those things.

So, what does this issue matter to anyone but me? Diddly-poop. I would like to be remembered as a good writer after I am gone. But that is not something I have any control over. Neither did anyone who now has a legacy as a writer. Edgar Allen Poe and Franz Kafka died in extreme poverty. H.P. Lovecraft died in obscurity, horribly alone and mentally ill. The Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche died after having a mental breakdown over the beating of a horse. And their work left a legacy. The legions of unremembered authors have none. I will end up wherever I belong after I am gone.

I exist. Not even God can change that now. And I have written and published my writing on the internet. It has the potential to live on after me as long as there is an internet. The world probably has less than fifty years of life left as it is. So, for now, I have to be satisfied that you bothered to read this and look at my drawings, whether you bothered to register a like or not. That is my legacy, or a ghost of it anyway.

Self examination is a critical feature of living a stoic life. And I find Stoicism to be a workable philosophy. I do believe that I have no power to alter the world around me, only the power to control and change myself. I find it works fine as a teacher. A teacher with self control can lead most of the students in the classroom down the happy path. That leaves only a few weirdos that you have to knock on the brain with a rubber hammer (figuratively, of course.)

But tonight my blood pressure is 176 over 90 (go-to-the-ER level numbers.) My blood sugar is 153. I made the fatal mistake of eating spaghetti and meatballs from the microwave. I get tired of a strict diabetic diet. But I can’t afford insulin either. Sometimes I feel more like not examining myself in that particularly painful way and just risking eating what I like without worrying about sudden death that I can’t avoid anyway.

There are some things I feel like I have to write yet. But I find it is harder and harder to do it with glaucoma eyes and arthritically-challenged fingers to use for battling an overly sensitive and somewhat vengeful keyboard and word processor. I have a story in my head about an autistic boy who wants to live alone in the forest and hears music in his head that no one else can hear. I have a story about teenagers battling suicidal depression by sitting in a circle naked down by the river, eating marijuana brownies and talking to ghosts. I have another story about teenagers learning about love during a journey to the center of the Earth where a monster has imprisoned one of their girlfriends. I have a really weird Aeroquest Sci-Fi story with flower people as bad guys and space goons eating a space station out from under the heroes. It’s already done. I just need to proofread and publish.

And I probably won’t get any of it done. Writing The Haunted Toy Store is going molasses-in-January slowly.

But we have to have hope to continue. And I do have hope. She lives inside my head and thinks she’s the Leopard Goddess of the Wastelands most of the time. But she’s still there. Still real.

Yeah, still good.

The most important part of a novel is how it ends. It is the ending of the story that does the most to establish the theme, make the points the author wants to make, or gives you the all-important feeling that the story is complete.

I have written nine good novels and ended the story nine times. I have reason to believe they are good books. Two of them were contest finalists. I have gotten no bad reviews (of the minimal number of times someone besides me has actually read one of these books). And even experienced editors have told me that my books are competent and good enough to be potential best sellers. But, of course, they have little chance of ever reaching a wider audience. I am an Indie author and have either published through pay-to-publish publishing companies or the free Amazon/Kindle publishing services. The way the story of me being a published author will end, though, is not a story of success and wealth and critical acclaim. I am dissolving into abject poverty and fatal ill health. I will not last to see my books hit the big time. And when I croak and become worm food, my books will be forgotten and mostly ignored, even by my family who look at it as a pie-in-the-sky dream rather than reality. Reality, unfortunately, really sucks.

The fact is, all the greatest and most worthwhile people that ever lived have suffered terribly and they were forced to endure much. Greed, villainy, injustice, inequality, bullying, rape, murder, and income taxes prevail in an unbalanced and unjust world. If Guy McPherson in the opening video is to be believed (if you haven’t already watched it, I suggest you don’t. Hearing that message from a credible climate scientist like him is very depressing.) then greedy, rich, and powerful people made the decision to murder us all decades ago, and there is nothing we can do about it.

So, here is how my story ends; I will continue to tell stories and write essays like this one until the very end. And, for me, that will come any day now. It is the only thing worth doing for me at this point in my life. I also hope that you will take heed of my example and endeavor to be the author of your own story’s end. And I am not suggesting you commit suicide or hole up in a bunker somewhere. I suggest you spend every day as if it is your last one on Earth. Cherish your loved ones. Do what pleases you to do. And, most of all, be the author of how your own story ends… plotted out with grace, theme, and meaning. A tribute to how you lived. And maybe you will be able to tell me sometime in the next life about what a colossal fool I was when I wrote this essay.

Pumpkinhead Hitler seems to be on the verge of multiple indictments from multiple investigations. But those of you who wear the red hats, don’t despair. It will probably only help him get elected as Fuhrer in 2024. The world is run by the wealthiest among us. And only criminals become billionaires. You have to be weirdly evil to make money in our crony-capitalism economy. You only have multiple billions if you have enough money to solve homelessness and hunger worldwide, but are only willing to spend it on rockets shaped like penises and owning Twitter. I am a pessimist. But pessimists are too often right.

The world is drowning in carbon dioxide. We are going to face the possible extinction of life on Earth because Republican industrialists would rather kill us all than forego all those fabulous short-term profits from burning all those fossil fuels that they extracted from the lands owned by other people down to six feet below the surface. Your life and mine are expendable to the Koch Brothers, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos. I don’t hate rich people, but if they are begging me to save them from an approaching killer storm, and I could actually do it… well, I would at least have to consider my options.

And all our schools will soon be privatized and limited in their ability to learn anything about anything that isn’t approved personally by Reichmarschall Ron DeSantis (who is not a saint, even in Italian.) No black poets like Langston Hughes will be in the libraries of any school. Nor any black novelists like James Baldwin. Nor black essayists like W. E. B. Du Bois. Any black literature of note is dangerous because it might make Florida’s white-skinned, wealthy elite children feel ashamed of being racist. And any gay children will be locked in closets. Trans individuals will officially no longer exist. And the letters C, R, and T will be removed from the alphabet.

But even Saint Ron DeSantis can’t cancel out the fact that Mickey Mouse and Disney World once existed. And Charlie Chaplin once made us laugh. And Groucho Marx once made fun of stuffy penguins who were engorged with dollars just like Bezos, Musk, and Trump. Good things came out of our brief stint as the dominant species on this planet. And even if it ends in infamy, at least it was worth doing.

Sometimes I simply have to stop and think hard about what I am thinking about. You can probably tell by today’s first Paffooney that I am thinking in Biblical proportions today. The picture is called “David Plays for Saul”. In the Bible story, the survival of Israel is definitely in question. King Saul, the anointed ruler, is under intense pressure from governing a kingdom that chose him rather than giving him a chance to choose for himself. He is surrounded by enemies with significant military power. He goes a bit loony over the matter, consulting astrologers and witches, even though God has told him through prophets, “Saulie, don’t do that, boy!” The prophet Samuel even goes so far as to find a new candidate for an anointed king, David the Shepherd, Son of Jesse. Saul uses his irrational mind to come up with a solution to the problem. “I know!” he says to himself. “I’ll murder the boy in front of God and everybody.” (Sort of a Trumpian solution, right?)

And then David plays his harp and sings. That decides the matter. Saul is calmed in his murderous mind and abandons murder plans just long enough to eventually lose his crown along with his head in battle against the Philistines. (No danger of Trump copying Saul there.)

So, as I sit and chew my cud and ruminate like a mooncalf, I am thinking we need a King David to replace the King Pumpkinhead we have now. And then he or she must fight harder than the Biblical David to overcome what has happened to us. If Israel represents the world, then Israel may soon be destroyed without a wise king. Climate change, dictators with nukes, and Republican kowtowing to billionaires are real problems not solvable through astrology.

Too often, it seems, I am the mooncalf, the monstrously malformed creature created by a lifetime of hard experience, loss, and fear of the future. But in many ways I am a self-made man. I know this because I sewed on my new right hand, implanted new eyeballs, and did numerous brain-enhancement surgeries on myself. (I do hope you realize I mean that figuratively, not literally. No, really! You can put away the torches and pitchforks!) I feel like a monster when I look at myself critically and end up not liking what I see.

Still, the world is full of beauty and wonder, for now, at least. And we must enjoy it while we have it, living the best life we can before it all too soon comes to its end.

The most important reason for being a nudist, in my humble and mostly worthless opinion, is the simple act of sitting naked outdoors in the summer sunshine and taking the time to meditate. Not thinking deep thoughts. Not daydreaming. But real meditation. Emptying your mind of worry, plans, thoughts, and beliefs. Simply reaching out to the world around you with your senses, absorbing it all into your very being, and becoming one with everything under the sun.

Meditation is good for you even if you wear comfortable clothes while doing it. You have to do it right. Not reading a book. Not listening to the Bee Gees, or any other music with words in it. Just slowly stirring the head juice and thinking about nothing. It can be more refreshing, energizing. and renewing than sleep. It is a special mind power.

And it is even more powerful when you do it with no cloth barriers between you and the biological environment around you.

Being nude is really more about getting to intimately know yourself than anything else. And meditating in the nude is about knowing this in the deepest places inside your mind.

Yep, Mickey has the blues… again.

He’s just finished proofreading The Necromancer’s Apprentice again. 12 errors corrected and the book successfully republished. Comma errors, typos, and poor-word-choice corrections can make a guy sad.

And Mickey feels awful all the time. Every joint hurts with arthritis. He hasn’t been remembering to eat on time, so his diabetes is filling his head with angry bees. He’s lonely because every friend he used to have was a teacher too, and now that he’s retired they are all far away and long ago, teaching in other schools, retired too, or dead.

And he’s depressed.

And then he remembers. He’s a storyteller. His head is full of imaginary people to talk to. And most of them are funny. And they can walk around naked if he wants them to be nudists. And in a sense, he is like God in that way. He is in control of everything when he’s writing a story.

But, ironically, he can write very little because of all of things that make him sad.

He’s a sad man.