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I was born in a November snowstorm in the middle of the 1950s. I am a child of the snow.

My best novel, Snow Babies, is based on a pair of week-long blizzards, one from childhood, and the other from when I was in high school. I endured both and learned that survival often depends on adaptability and a willingness to accept help from a close-knit community.

I have never had an easy relationship with cold and snow. I developed osteoarthritis at the age of eighteen. Iowa winters were hard on me from that point on. One of the key reasons my teaching career took place in Texas, not Iowa, was the fact that I was able to free myself from the crippling winter cold. Milder winters in Texas helped me a lot. I did, however, get lucky in the February Freeze of 2021. Our power company was not one of those whose natural-gas supplies froze. So, we never lost power, and our pitiful little space heaters kept us from freezing to death and becoming snow babies ourselves. Too many people died needlessly by freezing simply because Texas didn’t bother to prepare for the worst of winter. I could easily have left this life in a blizzard just as I came into it.

I have been particularly up against it the last couple of days. Temperatures in the 30s and 40s have frozen my knees and lower back to a state of stiffness that nearly makes me bedridden. Even my ribcage is aching every time I breathe. Ah, the joys of arthritic living. It is still possible that one day soon I will fall to the blinding white and be able to move no more. There is a symmetry to going out the same way you came in. But knowing me, I will probably die of heat stroke. At least, then, I will have irony on my side.

After the usurpation of the government by Don Cheetoh Trumpaloney and his Russian Trolls, I thought Prospero, in the form of Grandpa Joe Biden, had used some magic borrowed from Ariel to overcome the usurper’s evil plan. But, alas, there seems to be no magical weapon to fight off the monsters that the Republican Party have become. At this point, they haven’t actually won back control of the House and the Senate. But, the election now over, possibility remains that they will wrest control of both Houses away from Democrats and eliminate all progress for the rest of Biden’s first term.

It did not, however turn out as badly as it might have. Many election-denying candidates lost their races and the power they will have to subvert the 2024 election has been a bit mitigated. We will still probably all eventually succumb to death from catastrophic climate change because it is not profitable to the fossil-fuel overlords to save ourselves. They will pay gobs of money, possibly in the billions, to prevent Democrats from helping the majority of people in any way.

I try to be a humorist in my writing. Not a comedian-type joke-maker, but rather someone who portrays life in subtly amusing ways. But it is hard to be funny when the stakes are so high and consequences so serious. I will have to try harder. I will have to do better.

Perhaps I should’ve called this “Meditation while Procrastinating,” because I am having a hard time settling in to write down the words.

Or maybe I should have called it, “Procrastinating about Meditating,” because I am having a hard time even starting to think.

But, by thinking about how I am thinking and then writing about how I am writing, I have mostly stopped procrastinating, and the words are landing on paper… or, rather, they are being typed into the word processor.

The ideas are beginning to take shape.

Or, they would if my computer was kinder to arthritic fingers. Three typos so far as well as one new window opened accidentally as I sneexed… make that four typos. The correct word is “sneezed.”

But the harder it becomes to write something due to health problems, the more important it is to get it written. And the more I struggle with it, the better and more poignant the writing becomes.

I recently watched a YouTube video in which a screenwriting “expert” was saying that main characters in a work of fiction have a wound that they have to heal or overcome… or fail to overcome to make the story worth writing.

He also suggested that the wound has to reflect the author’s own reason for telling stories… the author’s own wounds.

This, of course, is utter nonsense. But it is also TRUE.

My most critical wound, the trauma I’ve taken a lifetime to overcome, was the sexual assault on my ten-year-old self. It robbed me of so many important things in my youth and later adulthood. And if I have overcome it, I did so mostly by myself, having kept my terrible secret a complete secret until I was in my thirties.

It is the reason that most of the characters in my stories are searching to overcome the difficulties of feeling loved and loveable, the heartache of dealing with irreplaceable loss and devastating trauma, and the fear of being nakedly honest in front of the judgemental eyes of the world.

I believe in facing the most fearsome things in life without armor.

Hence the reluctance to get started. The hesitation to make myself naked before the reading public, and the inability to even think of some of the most fearsome demons hidden in the land we must meditate on to get into.

So, now I have hemmed and hawed and eventually said what I came to say. You are seeing the naked me, even though no picture of my naked body appears here anywhere. It is my inner self I have shown you. The self I have meditated on deeply for many years. And it is only with reluctance that I expose my true self with my deepest thoughts and secrets. If I am going to get writing done… it has to be like this. I don’t struggle with writer’s block, whatever that is. Rather, it is the fear of the hidden monsters of self that force me to endlessly delay getting started on the archeological dig that is writing an essay like this.

I have been writing less and less for the last four months. I don’t know why. Maybe ill health and struggles to see through eyes hampered by glaucoma.

Right now I could name the three joints in my body that don’t hurt a lot faster than I could list a myriad of aches and pains that continue to slow me down. Cooler weather, air-pressure changes, and humidity all affect arthritis.

But my brain is slowing down too.

I don’t think as quickly as I once did.

I miss teaching.

And I am spending more time alone than I ever did in years past.

So, why am I so lazy?

I don’t know. But I am.

The question arises from this most recent illustration I drew, “Are you saying, Mickey, that kids can learn better if they go to school naked?”

No! Are you crazy?

I used to teach middle school students. Can you imagine kids from this current modern culture being given license to come to school starkers if they wish to do it? In the middle school world of half-brained sub-intellectuals passing judgement on everything? Especially judgments about appearance and attractiveness… or non-attractiveness? With brains fueled by hormones and the questionable values taught by TV and movies? Chaos! Fires being lit! Real and metaphorical! Windows being broken! Derisive laughter! Tears and sobbing from the offended! And that would just be the teachers.

But the truth is, if we look at the studies of B.F. Skinner and his recommendations for child-rearing in his Utopian propositions in the book Walden Two, children not taught to be ashamed of their nakedness from early on would develop more peacefully and naturally into perceptive and intelligent learners if allowed to be openly and happily naked.

Skinner, an experimental scientist, believed everything in life should conform to findings from scientific observations and scientific experiments. How loony is that? Why would we do something that is practical, natural, and beneficial just because it might enhance your ability to learn and enjoy your experience of the world?

In my illustration, I was actually intending to convey a notion of the relationship of openness and innocence to learning. The two children sharing the big danged book on the floor are nude because they are willing to approach the material with a sensory receptivity that can only be hampered by the barriers and limits we put on ourselves, like the clothing that we shield and limit our bodies with. So, I would never suggest it was appropriate to learn things while naked. Or even that, with the right training and cultural shifts, that going to school naked would be a good thing.

Even I have nightmares about being naked in school. In my dreams I sometimes dream about forgetting to put on clothes before going in front of a hostile classroom to teach something they all find boring and awful… while I am naked and awful myself. I still have that nightmare even now that I am retired.

No, I would never suggest that. Unless, somehow, you can suggest something by not suggesting it. Surely I am not tricksy enough to try to do anything like that. And remember, I was an actual teacher in an actual classroom for many years where I merely thought of them all as naked, because kids are all transparent about their lives and motivations and can’t keep a secret even if they didn’t want me to know everything about them, even the bad kids, and even things they wanted to hide from the teacher.

Here is a link to B.F. Skinner’s book, Walden Two; https://books.google.com/books/about/Walden_Two.html?id=lMpgDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=kp_read_button#v=onepage&q&f=false

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.

I fear the future. I fear the things that will be required of us will be so far beyond our capabilities to cope with it that we will be overwhelmed. Is there going to be any life on Earth by 2050?

If everything ends more completely than the Book of Revelations suggests it will, then we will have to be satisfied that life on Earth was a beautiful thing while it lasted. And the universe as a whole is better off than it would have been if we never existed.

And I am only a simple school teacher that used to yell at seventh graders. So, I could be wrong, and life will find a way.