I have now moved from Texas back to Iowa, the land I was born in. It is a big change in my life, especially leaving my wife and daughter in Texas, not because of divorce but because I am retired and in poor health, while my wife is not done with her Texas teaching career.
I will live on the family farm with my sister and use Iowan healthcare to stay alive while my wife teaches for four more years. If we both still live that long, then decisions will be made again.
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Tuesday, in the early morning, I was back in an emergency room bed for what I feared might be heart pain. It was bad enough to force me to spend more money on the ER, even though I had doubts about what was really wrong. Heart pain is not worth making a mistake on. I am not ready to be dead.
Fortunately, it was not my heart. That was the first thing they eliminated… for good reason. Suspect number two was one of my two gallstones, which might have been guilty of causing my atypical chest pain. They used a sonogram to determine that there was no inflammation around the dislocated gallstone. The third culprit turned out to be a hard possibility. My colon was clogged with hard poo, probably clinging to the poo pockets in my diverticulosis.
Diverticulosis is a common condition that can develop in your colon, especially as you age. It means that little pouches form in the inside lining of your colon. They usually don’t cause any problems. But rarely, they may bleed or develop an infection (diverticulitis).
So, this all gets nasty. Hard poop is distending my belly. Pooping, which used to be regular, daily, and easy, is now difficult, painful, and time-consuming. And possibly life-threatening. You can laugh, but for three days now, I have been straining, moaning, and sweating five separate times a day to push out tiny, hard packets of poo to keep my innards from turning green and causing me to die in a ball of pain and smelly poo.
I am taking four new medications, only one of which is a laxative, meant to help me stay alive long enough to spend lots of money on gastroenterologists.
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I love to make the pictures I make,
To draw, paint, and edit, I love to create.
Faces and places and photos I take…
And viewers give praises or even berate.
AI helps me now that my hands ache and shake,
But the ideas come from my head,
With thoughts robots can’t make.
I will keep making pictures until I am dead.
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Anita Jones is a character in several of my books, but she also represents a girl from my own childhood who was as much of a regret for me as she was for poor old Charlie Brown.
Anita Jones, of course, is not her real name. You can’t even look at the picture and tell by what she looks like who I am secretly portraying. But the thing is, she was definitely real to me. And I would still be horrified to have her find out how I really felt about her.
She was not my first crush. I mooned over the beautiful Alicia Stewart (also not a real name) from second grade through sixth grade. But Anita was always right there. Often right behind me and to my left whenever I turned around on the playground. Not looking me in the eye, but probably looking at me until I began to turn. I know I looked at her whenever she wore dresses or shorts. She had beautiful peach-colored legs.
There was a time when, in Music class, the boys were forced to ask a girl to be a dance partner in the square dancing lessons that Miss Malik was giving us. My best friend Mark had asked Alicia to dance with him, so my number one choice was already taken. And when it was my turn, Anita looked at me with those wonderful brown eyes and heart-shaped face. And I… was too embarrassed to pick her. Then everyone would know how I really felt about her. So, I picked my cousin instead. My heart was lodged in my left shoe for three days after the look I saw on her face. Not my cousin’s face. The brown eyes and heart shape.
Then later, when I was on the high school bus to Belmond, Mickey Schmidt (we never called him Michael because I was Michael) made a joke that embarrassed me.
“Have you ever been caught masturbating in the bathtub?”
“No,” I told him, in disgust. Anita was in the seat across the aisle listening.
“It’s a good place to do it in, then, ain’t it.”
I turned as red as any maple leaf ever managed in late fall. She was smiling at me.
“I would’ve liked to have seen that,” she said. “I bet you even have a lot of hair down there.”
I would’ve laughed if I hadn’t been so embarrassed that my head might’ve caught fire.
But thinking about that humiliating moment on the bus later, I realized that she had actually been brave enough to admit she was thinking about my genitals. I had never asked her on a date or sat beside her in Art Class as I should have. My life might’ve been very different if I had. Even if I had asked her to dance.
But somewhere in the Multiverse, a parallel me is probably married to a parallel Anita. And I bless them for what might’ve been. At least, it’s lovely to think so now.
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I will attempt to share with you now a bit of hard-earned Stoic wisdom learned not from Greek philosophers, but from long years worth of trying with all my power to teach anything at all to twelve-and-thirteen-year-olds. Bear with me, I am not crazy. I am a retired middle school teacher.
*No matter how naturally gifted you are with teaching skills, you have to learn everything about teaching the hard way, trying and failing repeatedly until you get it right, or until the students kill and eat you.*
*The only person whose behavior you can control is you yourself. Student behavior is chaos.*
*While you can’t control student behavior, you can use your behavior to corral attention and lead them towards something that resembles civilized behavior. (But learning how to corral those little piggies can take forever.)*
*You will want to do everything “the easy way” because that is the only way you can reach classroom goals in a reasonable amount of time. Of course, it takes practically no time to learn that there is NO EASY WAY!*
*Most teachers rely on drill and practice, and this is why there are so few excellent teachers. Drill and practice is the most effective way to teach students to hate the subject you are trying to teach.*
*Students learn best in a “Laughing Classroom” where they talk to each other, activities are creative and sometimes loud, and learning becomes fun.*
*Many principals consider “Laughing Classrooms” to be a good reason to punish or dismiss a teacher.*
*Good teaching is a subversive act. Only the people who are supposed to teach or learn really want it to take place in most schools.*
*All of your students will misbehave at one time or another. Some only briefly and very mildly. Others for an endless period of time that you hope ends short of murder.*
*When a student misbehaves and you have to take them into the hallway to yell at them and/or murder them, you secretly tell them that you believe in them, describe the behavior and why it disappointed you, and then describe what they should have done instead. Follow that by asking them if someone else needs to get involved, parents, principal, police, or executioner, or if they would like to go back in the room and try again.*
*Your worst students are the ones who need you the most. You better learn somewhere along the way to love past the ugly.*
*Nothing you will ever do in your career will beat reaching the unreachable and teaching the unteachable. I pray that you will get to experience it at least once. And no one but you and that student will ever know about it.*
Now you can go be a school teacher and be all Stoic like Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. And there was no secret code for anything evil in that last one. If you ever experience it, you will know then what I am talking about. Not everything you are proud of doing in life has to get a gold medal on a stage to be worth doing. But if you are a teacher, you already know that.
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I was born naked. When I die, I will walk into the light so naked I will not even be wearing my body. Nakedness is the natural condition of all life. Even when wearing clothes, we are basically naked, exposed to every predator, seeker, and interested party. The deep-sea ghost in the picture above wears no more clothing than the fish in the sea. In fact, he probably wears less than the fish since they have scales on the outside of their skin. Being naked is how life should be.
I enjoy drawing and painting nudes. This art movement dates back before recorded history began—maybe more than that if stories of Atlantis are true. Ask the deep-sea ghost, as he may know something about that. But I am still creating new nude art despite arthritis attacking my hands, with the help of digital and AI tools that make art editing possible. And I enjoy sharing that with you in this post, even though it means I can’t share it on Facebook because genitals and female breasts terrify Zuckerberg. Looking at nude art is healthy and rewarding, and it covers many walls in quality art museums.
My art is innocent and non-sexual based on how it is presented by me, not focusing on anything provocative or intended to generate arousal. Of course, I cannot account for people who are aroused by what you see here. There are those individuals, often deprived and made obsessive by religious repression, who simply have damaged responses to things. More viewing and acceptance of such images can be healing and have a broadening effect. So, the naked race above should benefit you, not harm you.
All I can say in summary is that I wish more people saw nudity in art as I do. It is something to revere and admire, not be repulsed by.
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Truthfully, Mickey hasn’t written much since the heart surgery in May. He has been battling illness, financial problems, and medical expenses. He has also been struggling with the high Texas heat, the loss of the ability to drive for himself, and the scrambling to rewrite plans to move to Iowa. So, I, Ariel, his beloved posable plastic doll, am writing this post to clear things up.
He has been keeping this blog going every day, mostly with reposted old posts, which are both fairly well-written and mostly unseen by folks looking at this blog now. Old followers haven’t seen most of them, because nearly no one used to read them. I hope you like them. Especially this one that I wrote. It’s the first one that I have written because he used to ask his dog to write the fill-in post, but she is in doggie heaven now. And I have to have him type this for me because my plastic doll fingers don’t really move. But it is me writing this. I hope you like it a lot!
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I know this from actual childhood experience. There is nothing so freeing for the young soul as running naked in a pasture where there’s a cool creek for skinny dipping. The milk cows didn’t mind. The bull was in the barn. The water was cold, originating from an artesian well. My heart was pumping happily.
Now, much nearer my next chess game with the Grim Reaper, I am faced with freeing myself of everything once again. I have had to give up driving. My daughter now owns the car I am still paying for. I gave it to her to help her get a job despite being in her early twenties. And specifically because with 50 years of arthritis and 25 years of diabetes under my belt, I have had to give up the idea that I can safely drive a car in city traffic.
I am also planning on moving to Iowa to the family farm established by my great-grandfather on my mother’s side. I will move into the farm place with my sister, nearer to where the rest of my family has lived and died. I will be living there without my wife, who is not yet ready to retire from her teaching job. And without my daughter, who will stay in the big city to take care of her mother. We are not divorcing. I just need to be where I don’t interfere with the frenetic life of an older teacher (not older than me, just older than the other teachers). My sister is also retired and has more time to do things like getting me to doctor appointments in the middle of a workday.
I will leave all my furniture in the house near Dallas, and leave almost all of my books, my massive doll collection, my memories of raising our family in that house, and other things too sad to think about. I would be in Iowa already if I hadn’t had the heart problem in May, and the possible skin cancer problem from last week. But soon I will be there again. Spiritually naked and free. Ready for that cold dip into the coming darkness we all have to anticipate.
Don’t cry for me. I am running naked and free.
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We like miniature figures and homemade illustrations in our D&D campaign. Let me show you a bit of the excessively obsessive results of this preference.
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Mike Murphy and Blueberry Bates are recurring characters in my hometown novels. So far they have appeared in The Bicycle-Wheel Genius and Magical Miss Morgan, both of which are now published and available through Amazon.
The Bicycle-Wheel Genius is now available on Amazon through this link;
Magical Miss Morgan is available through this link;
The first book documents their star-crossed romance, beginning as ten-year-olds and following through until they are going on thirteen. Blueberry is a girl with a terrible secret. She is not like other girls and has to protect this secret, which will only become harder and harder to contain as time goes on. She lives with her father who barely notices her, an aunt, her father’s sister, who knows the secret and punishes Blueberry for it, and her two older sisters who cherish her and dote on her, and probably are the only reason she is still alive. Her mother, unfortunately, died when she was a baby. But both books she appears in so far are comedies. I will not go into the possible tragedies lying wait in ambush for her in her distant future. The tragedies are simply not funny enough to be a part of everything. Like many of my characters, she is based on people from my own life and experience. She is a combination of a girl I once loved and a boy I once taught. If that’s not confusing enough, I can add that Blueberry loves to draw, a detail that comes about because she is also partly based on me. She particularly loves to draw pictures of Mike Murphy. She might have drawn the next Paffooney (if she were a real person and not just some made-up girl that only lives in my weird old imagination).
Mike Murphy is a Norwall Pirate. Not just any Pirate, but their best athlete, tree-climber, and wild-story believer. He does everything the Pirate leader, Tim Kellogg, (the grand and glorious and mostly notorious Pirate leader) thinks up for him to do. He believes every lie Tim tells him, and faithfully defends the Pirates and their leader, even when it gets him detention (again!) from their favorite teacher, Miss Francis Morgan. He starts out running away from Blueberry, as any red-blooded, normal American boy would. But he eventually lets her catch him, as any red-blooded, normal American boy would at about that age, the middle of the wonder years. He becomes her best friend and greatest white-knight-sort-of protector, even though he is torn between that and loyalty to Tim and the Pirates and the lies they tell.
I am now planning a third book that will allow these two characters to adventure together. I will call this novel Kingdoms Under the Earth. It will begin with Blueberry being kidnapped by evil flu fairies that take her away to the dark parts of the fairy world under the surface of this world in a feverish coma. Mike Murphy must decide to follow her and rescue her, which he will do via the bad advice of a fairy friend, kissing Blueberry on the lips, contracting her disease, and sharing in her comatose suffering. Then Mike’s best friend, Tim Kellogg, and his big sister Dilsey both agree that they must follow also to help rescue both Blueberry and Mike. It will be a great adventure through illness, imagination, and the many hidden kingdoms of fairy magic that lie directly under our world.
Now, I suppose you are wondering why I am giving you details about characters in a book, or rather books, that I haven’t even finished writing yet. Well, if you are dedicated enough to reading my loopy and boring old posts to get this far, it is probably safe to tell you that I don’t really know either. I also want to find out. What do the next sentences say? Oh, yes. Mike Murphy already exists as a Pirate in my published book Catch a Falling Star. He is an established character that I have to twist and tweak into fitting into new stories. Blueberry has been prancing around in my imagination and drawing colored-pencil Paffoonies since the 1970’s, but I am only now weaving her into the stories I have in me and are burning with a red-hot flame to get told. So I’m not completely crazy to do this. Only about ninety percent… right?
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Catch a Falling Star 