Catch a Falling Star

So, now I probably have skin cancer. This will be the first time since I won a battle with malignant melanoma in 1983 that a mole needed to be removed and was potentially cancerous. It is already treated. The dermatologist already used freeze spray on the site on my right temple. She froze a portion of my head to kill the cancer. Not a good thing for the thing I need most to think with. But hopefully preventing a spread of more deadly things to be discovered later. I get a biopsy on July 13th. Thank God it doesn’t happen on a Friday too.

But if that horrible two-part black thing makes me suffer a while before turning me into compost in an urn somewhere, I won’t be the only one punching my train ticket to Pandemonium, the capitol of Hell. Putin in Russia is not only losing a war, but he has a little civil war on the side. Talk about having a full plate of spaghetti. And the Texas heat isn’t evidence of the world ending in fire due to climate change. The Republican party refuses to let that stuff be true because 3% of all climate change scientists are still holding the matter open for debate. Joel tells me that the 3% Trumps all 97% of the rest of scientists and proves that it is all a Chinese/Democrat conspiracy to destroy our wonderful fossil fuel industry.

So, since we are all gonna die anyway, here’s a few thoughts about what we can do with our remaining pre-apocalypse months.

1. PLEASE BUILD MORE GODDAM SOLAR PANELS AS FAST AS YOU CAN!!!
2. Let’s also get used to living in very different ways. Learn to live in atmosphere-enclosed domes
3. There will need to be underwater city-domes where they are safer from hurricanes and tornados and raging wild fires.
4. We will need to learn to desalinate and deacidify seawater.

6. We will need to create and manage fish farms and sea-plant farms for food in the refined waters of the United States of Oceania.

7. We will need to learn to travel between underwater, surface water, through the air, into outer space, and onto the surfaces of the Moon and Mars.

8. And living in space like Han Solo and Captain Kirk.

Things will simply not be the same. Of course, if we all don’t learn to do these things, we will have to adjust to being dead… even extinct. Being extinct stinks.

We can adapt to anything.

Yes, he’s at it again. Silly old Mickey in his birthday suit is writing metaphorically about nudity, nakedness, and naturism. The gross old coot has to do something to survive the Texas heat.

You are probably thinking, and rightly so, that since the crazy old bird was a school teacher for 31 years, and a school student for 18 years before that to become one, he’d be a bit more circumspect about his teacher-honor than to be going around promoting public nudity on his silly little blog again. And you’d be right. This society we now live in doesn’t seem like it is going to approve public nudity generally anytime soon. Most places around the USA make it illegal to go outside your house in nothing but the skin you were born in. You can be arrested for public indecency. Especially if you are ugly when you are naked.

You know it didn’t used to be that way. The ancient Greeks were wild about public nudity. It was the rule for competing in the Olympics and doing business in the agora in the downtown of every Greek metropolis. In fact, the schools that ancient-Greek Mickey would have taught in required the students to be naked for half the day at the very least as they attended school. Of course, those laws only applied to boys. Nobody really wanted to see a naked girl back then. Unless she was made of marble and depicted Aphrodite. They were wild about her naked carcass.

But Mickey learned that being a teacher in the 20th and 21st Century schools of Texas was all about being metaphorically naked.

It’s true. College speech teachers would tell you that, to overcome stage fright on the first day of class, you needed to imagine your students were naked to put yourself at ease, feeling superior because you were dressed and they were not.

But Mickey looked out at those classes of 25 to 30 students, unwashed, feral, and completely hormone-fueled, and realized they really were naked… metaphorically. Even with what passed for clothing on their sweaty little monster bodies, you could still see every naked fault, attitude, indiscretion, and sometimes beauty about them, even when packed in layers with a snowsuit on top. But it never snowed in South Texas back then anyway. They were as good as naked all the time. You could literally see which ones were evil, which were shrinking violets, which were hungry predators, and which ones were imagining the teacher naked to swing the advantage over to themselves.

And teaching entire classrooms full of naked twelve-to-seventeen-year-olds, you learned to understand what their needs really were. You could see their naked shame at not being able to read as well as the smart girls in class. You could see which ones were bullied in school and probably belittled even at home. And you learned to love them… even the bad ones… in a non-inappropriate way. Teacher love. Because they were naked. Metaphorically. At least, that’s what stupid Mickey thought.

And being metaphorically naked means many things at once. In their unarmored form, naked people are vulnerable. They are also not hiding anything under disguises or costumes that make you think they are something they are not. That leather jacket on that metaphorically naked little boy doesn’t hide the fact that he’s insecure about his male peers thinking he is only acting tough because he’s trying to hide the fact that he may be gay. Or that naked little girl in the tight blue jeans and shirt two sizes too small is afraid that she will never find love amongst the male orangutans and gorillas she is most fascinated by.

And naked angels in European art in the Middle Ages symbolized metaphorically, purity and innocence. And some of the naked angels in Mickey’s classes were also metaphorically innocent, no matter how many times they may have goofed up and lost a bit of their innocence.

And they are especially metaphorically naked when they write in their journals, something Mickey made them do at least three days out of five every week. Mickey told them he would read them when he graded them, that they only had to get the two hundred words written in each entry to get an easy 100 percent. And Mickey emphasized that he would read them and not tell anybody else about what they wrote unless they volunteered to have the best stuff read out loud. And, boy howdy! When they told Mickey what they wanted him to know about their naked little lives, it was often stuff that could embarrass Marine Corps drill sergeants, longshoremen, and undercover vice cops. Extremely naked information… metaphorically.

And so, stupid Mickey thought that, just maybe… being metaphorically naked might be good for you. Cathartic and cleansing. And freeing in a way that can only be appreciated by someone who has long been repressed and imprisoned by lingering trauma and fear like Mickey secretly knew something about. Yes, the difference between being metaphorically and literally naked was not very great at all.

And you know what that meant a stupid Mickey was going to think.

The angel of writing inspiration is angry with me. It has been too long since I buckled down to writing some WIP words every day. I used to do at least 500 words a day on the work in progress at the very least. Today, there were no words added to The, Education of Poppensparkle, He Rose on a Golden Wing, or The Haunted Toy Store. Three possible WIPs unfinished and available for daily attention. All of them are well along, but all of them have not been touched in three weeks. I haven’t written anything today but this post.

Susano, the angel of writing inspiration, doesn’t accept the fact that my health issues have been getting in the way. While it’s true I may have skin cancer once again, he points out that I have often coped with health worries in the past by losing myself in a good story.

So, what do I do? He looks like a small boy that I could maybe beat in an arm-wrestling match, but he IS an angel. He has special heavenly strength that I can’t possibly compete with. So, tomorrow… Buckle down, old Mickey, buckle down!