I do write poetry. But I must admit, I am not a serious poet. I am a humorist at heart, so I tend to write only goofy non-serious poems like this one;
So here is a poem that rhymes but has too much “but-but-but” in it. A poem about pants should not have too many “buts” in it. One butt per pair, please. So this is an example of spectacularly bad poetry. Why do we need bad poetry? Because it’s funny. And it serves as a contrast to the best that poetry has to offer.
As a teacher I remember requiring students to memorize and recite Robert Frost’s poem, “The Road Not Taken”. Now this sort of assignment is a rich source of humorous stories for another day. Kids struggle to memorize things. Kids hate to get up in front of the class and speak with everybody looking at them. You get a sort of ant-under-a- magnifying-glass-in-the-sun sort of effect. But in order to truly get the assignment right and get the A+, you have to make that poem your own. You have to live it, understand it, and when you reach that fork in the road in your own personal yellow wood, you have to understand what Frost was saying in that moment. That is the life experience poetry has a responsibility to give you.
Hopefully I gave that experience to at least a few of my students.
Bad poetry makes you more willing to twirl your fingers of understanding in the fine strands of good poetry’s hair. (Please excuse that horrible metaphor. I do write bad poetry, after all.)
But all poetry is the same thing. Poetry is “the shortest, clearest, best way to see and touch the honest bones of the universe through the use of words.” And I know that definition is really bad. But it wasn’t written on this planet. (Danged old Space Goons!) Still, knowing that poetry comes from such a fundamental place in your heart, you realize that even bad poetry has value. So, I will continue writing seriously bad poetry in the funniest way possible. And all of you real poets who happen to read this, take heart, I am making your poetry look better by comparison.
Wow, this is potentially a very short essay. The answer to what the title suggests is easily one of the many synonyms for “Zero.” “Nada” en español. “Nichts” auf Deutsch.
My sex-education history is very middle-class American from the 1950s and early 1960s. You might think I would’ve learned about the facts of life from my mother the registered nurse of many years. And fathers back then were expected to have that “awkward talk” with their sons about birds and bees in such a way that boys would understand about storks being nonsense and cabbage patches with babies in them were only for really weird cartoons.
But when asked, my mother said, “You will be learning about that in school when the time comes.” And my dad said, “You already learned about that, haven’t you?” To which he did not wait for a reply.
Ah, well, I got the information from a school friend who was almost a year older than me, and therefore he knew everything. He described for me how it worked. I was horrified and didn’t believe him. He tried and failed to show me how to masturbate, and tried to explain what a blow job was. So, I learned it all from “Buck” before that was ever even his nickname. And miraculously, everything he taught me had a glimmer of truth in it but was almost entirely wrong.
There were, of course, opportunities to see girls naked at various times. But when we tried to bribe them, we never had what they wanted. And the one birthday party where all the girls in my class got to see the boys skinny-dipping in the creek, an incident I wrote about elsewhere, I was lucky enough to only be standing on the bank, fully dressed, and watching the naked little boys splash and play when the girls were spotted watching at the top of the hill. So, my knowledge of female anatomy consisted of seeing sisters sometimes and wondering if what Brian said about them having sexual organs in the middle of their backs was actually true. How were we supposed to know? Being naked in co-ed situations was forbidden.
But then the worst happened. I was sexually assaulted by another boy, an older, bigger, and stronger boy. I was traumatized. And sexuality became a thing of my haunted nightmares. And nobody had, at that point in my life, ever told me the actual truth about where babies came from and what sex was actually all about.
I truly hated myself from the ages of ten through eighteen. I harmed myself, intentionally burning the skin on my lower back against the heating grate in our house during winter because I felt the need to make sexual urges and feelings go away. I seriously planned to kill myself as a sophomore in high school. My parents never knew anything about it. The high school counselor knew something was wrong, but I couldn’t tell him what was actually wrong because I was repressing the memory hard at that point, and didn’t know how to put anything into words. He had to settle for assuring me that I could tell him anything if and when I was ready. But the Methodist minister had taken it upon himself to teach us the actual facts of life in middle school. During confirmation class, he drew the reproductive parts both inside and outside, male and female on the chalkboard in the church basement. He explained how babies were made and how everything functioned. He explained that no part of the process was a sin in itself. Only the misuse of the process was frowned upon by God. He explained how masturbation was a natural part of growing up and sexual urges could be transformed into lifelong love and intimacy. It was the first ray of sunlight breaking through the clouds that were killing me.
And then came that Saturday afternoon where I had made up my mind to put an end to it with a kitchen knife. But before I either cut my wrists or stabbed myself in the heart as I had often thought about doing, I called a friend one last time. We didn’t talk about being depressed or what I was planning to do. But he sensed something was up. Of the many things we talked about, he managed to say I was a good friend and he liked being able to talk about things with me. I never told him the truth about it. But his generosity in that moment saved my life. I owe him what I could only repay by living a good life and being a good person. I am fairly sure he has done the same.
So, what does any of this have to do with what Mickey knows about sexuality?
Well, there are a few assertions I can make that are true for my life.
Sex is a good thing. It allows you to connect intimately with another human being. It nurtures love and family ties for however long the individuals involved are capable of it.
Children should be taught about sex from an early age. That is the only way to protect them from wrong information and being vulnerable to predators like the one who got hold of me.
Masturbation is not an evil thing. It helps you learn your body’s abilities and limits and prepares you for a sex life you can share with someone else. It also boosts your immune system and helps fight depression.
Sex is about love, not exploitation, power, or control over someone else. It is not to be used to harm anyone, although many use it in that way. Sex is only dirty and evil if it is used wrongly.
People need to hear these things about sex. Too many don’t know what they need to know at the time they need to know it.
I am not advocating free love, only good love, no matter how it is made good for you.
So, yes, I know… Mickey is an idiot. He is coming from a rather dark place to assert these things are true. But isn’t that what life is for? To use the hard things, the bad things, the dark and evil things, the things you had to overcome in the course of your life to make a little wisdom to pass along to someone else?
Be happy. Be well. And if you are having great sex in your life, you are allowed to enjoy it.
There are some days when you are in the middle of your daily essay and you suddenly lose interest in the topic you are writing about. So, you can either muddle your way through and tepidly write something that at least won’t totally embarrass you, or you can take note, like now, that some days are just like that.
I have written and posted something every day for 542 days in a row. My goal is two consecutive years worth of every-day posting. Sometimes that means a post like this one… deadline coming up and brain deflation… So, we make do. Or doo-doo. You get to decide which.
Today’s Paffooney is a tribute to a childhood hero, Aquaman. I drew the picture from a comic book inspiration source coming from DC Comics in the 1960’s. Aquaman is a B-level superhero with not nearly so many fans as the big three, Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman. He was, however, my second favorite after Spiderman. He was more important to me than the Avengers. And this was strange, because I only had the chance to read the sacred comic books in the old barbershop in uptown Rowan. I only remember about two different issues that I was able to read during the long wait for a haircut. (Haircuts on Saturday took forever, because all the bald and crew-cut farmers would take forever getting their hair cut. And they hardly had any hair! I think the barber cut each hair individually.)
Aquaman and Aqualad would journey together in an incredible undersea world of sea monsters, giant fish, scuba divers, villains like Black Manta, and Mera, a real hot underwater babe. Topo the octopus could play comic relief by playing musical instruments or getting drunk on old lost kegs of pirate rum. I became a part of the adventure. I’m not sure whether I imagined myself more as Aquaman himself, or Aqualad. Aqualand was dressed all in red and blue, my favorite colors. I liked his blue swim-trunks. I myself could never wear swim trunks without a fatal case of embarrassment over my knobby knees and hairy legs. I admired Aqualad’s smooth and muscled boy-legs, though not without some shame and embarrassment. Some suggest that the relationship between Aquaman and Aqualad was a homo-erotic thing just like Batman and Robin. But, hey… NO IT WASN’T! It was a hero and sidekick that mirrored the complex relationship between a father and son. My father and I could never talk at any deeper level than Aquaman talked to Aqualad. Yet my father had super-powers for solving my problems and helping me do things and make things. Yes, I think I loved Aquaman because he reminded me of my own father in his quiet competence.
And I had a Captain Action Aquaman costume, a Christmas present and wonderful treasure. I played with it so much that only the broken trident, mask, and swim fins remain. The rest was all broken and unraveled and disintegrated from being played with. The Aquaman in my Captain Action collection has replacement parts in it to make it more complete. Yes, I spent time and money putting that toy back together so that I might play with it yet again.
So why is the super-powered King of the Sea so important to me? After all, his super powers are to breath underwater and telepathically talk to fish. I think, reading back over this stupid little essay, that the most important theme is the father-son thing. I never owned a single Aquaman comic book as a kid, but I watched him on Saturday morning TV. He was one of the Superfriends. And my father had been in the Navy on Aircraft Carriers. Yes, Aquaman is my favorite because Aquaman is secretly my father.
Being an artist is a matter of genetics, luck, and loads of practice. I began drawing when I was only four or five years old. I drew skulls and skeletons, crocodiles and deer on everything. My kindergarten and first grade teachers were constantly gritting their teeth over the marked-up margins of every workbook and worksheet. I drew and colored on everything. I eventually got rather good, drawing in pencil, crayon, ink, and as you see here, colored pencil. I loved to draw the people and things around me. I also drew the things of my imagination. I drew my best girl, Alicia, and I drew the half-cobra half-man that lived in the secret cavern under our house. I drew a picture of the house across the underpass from Grandma Mary’s house. I drew cardinals, and I drew Snoopy cartoons. I drew my sports heroes in football and hockey, Donny Anderson and Gordie Howe. I drew monsters with fangs and fuzzy animals with huge soulful eyes. I still draw and it’s mostly the same things that I drew when I was a child. I will post more of the drawings here in the near future to dazzle you with my talents and ridiculous sense of the absurd.
I wish I could be more efficient in my old age, especially with writing things for this blog, continuing to write good books, and doing all the things around the house that need to be done just to make my way from one week into the next. But now that I have to lug baskets of clothing to the washateria to get my clothes clean, and I have to pick my clothes up off the floor of the bedroom to put them in baskets, and my arthritis says “NO!” rather painfully every time I need to do these things, I get discouraged and have to be a nudist more or accept being a rather smelly individual.
I have also found that being in pain and having the volcano-hot weather make the pain worse slows me down when it comes to getting good ideas for the daily blog. This blog is a good example of what I am talking about.
The one thing that has gotten easier, ironically, is going to the toilet. Zip, splash, zoom! And I am done with something many people my age take a half hour or more with the assistance of a newspaper, I-phone, or a good book to accomplish. Dang! Eating lots of fiber does pay off.
I think I posted this picture once before and told you it was inspired by William Blake’s poem The Tyger! That is still true. I wasn’t telling a lie, at least, I don’t believe I was. So the poem goes like this;
The idea is that the Tyger represents some unknowable evil that we must fear and respect because it is beyond our understanding. But the kid in the picture seems to be unafraid. Was that a mistake? Or was I really thinking this?
Apologies to Bill Watterson for stealing his cartoon for this post. I needed a more dangerous-looking Tyger than the one I had.
Lately, I have been getting good signs from my book-sales dashboard at Amazon.. People have started buying and reading my books, at least, the ones with nudist characters in them. A Field Guide to Fauns and Recipes for Gingerbread Children lead the way with more than a thousand pages read on Kindle Unlimited between them. I have already made more than $8.00 total this month in only the last two weeks.
Like the male cardinal who shows up in our yard when good things are happening, it is a sign that it is not all done for nothing. $8.00 will make no real difference to my bank account. But it does show that people are reading my books. I know that this does not sound like the results of lots of readers reading, but remember, publishers, especially Amazon, always screw writers out of most of what they deserve when books are sold.
The most expensive of the books that are actually being bought are priced at less than $3.00, of which, most of that money goes towards Amazon’s e-book-making expenses (whatever those are). If I needed to make myself rich, I would never have become first a teacher, and then a fiction writer. Having readers is the thing. And these are a couple of my best books that are getting read.
So, I take it as a good sign. A symbol that I really am an author.
