Catch a Falling Star

As a family, when our three kids were small, we were seriously addicted to camping. National parks, commercial campgrounds, and sometimes even in the back yard next to the pool. (We had a swimming pool until changing weather conditions changed that, cracking the pool and giving the city the excuse it needed to bully us into removing the pool and declaring bankruptcy over the expenses my week in the hospital after losing the argument with the city caused.) So, in the back yard it was okay to sleep naked outdoors and go skinny dipping in the pool accidentally in the middle of the night when you have to go into the house to pee. And it was great.

And even in national parks, you can get away with a bit of naked camping if you wait until after dark. And in Texas the risk of rattlesnakes was real. Except in one place we camped. Over East near Victoria, Texas there was a park with a man-made lake that had alligators in it… and water moccasins… and eagles flying above it. So, there were no rattlesnakes. The alligators and the eagles eat them. But the alligators and eagles don’t eat water moccasins. So, no skinny dipping after dark

We spent one Thanksgiving weekend at that park in Victoria with the gators, eagles, and water moccasins.

And we went with my in-laws, grandpa and grandma, and my sister-in-law and her second husband with their three kids and their fancy, air-conditioned motor home. And my parents, one of my two sisters, and my little brother and his wife, dedicated tent campers all. (And all of them dedicated to the idea of NOT being nudists.) It was an unusual Thanksgiving because my wife’s family is Filipino. And we had a lot of fried fish and fried hot dogs and friend stuff with Filipino names. And a turkey that my brother was determined to cook in an oil cooker that sat over the campfire which he had learned how to use at his place near Houston. The Thanksgiving campfire, oil-cooked-turkey experiment got flash-cooked in a sudden whoosh of unexpected fireballs, and the blackened bird meat ended up being a favorite of all the Filipinos. Myself, I was planning to eat hot dogs all along. I don’t like turkey. But it was a very warm November in Southeast Texas that year. And it was hot way late into the night. I was not allowed to sleep nude because… well, wife’s orders. She and my three kids left our tent every night before a half hour of tossing and turning in the humid heat had passed, and ended up in the motor home with the air conditioning. Leaving me to swelter in the tent alone. Which I didn’t do.

Having learned from the alien encounter in Iowa about the possibility of naked transcendental experiences, I spent four nights that holiday walking in my sleeping robe down to a picnic table on the shore of the lake. Water moccasins hunt in the water. So do alligators. So as long as I stayed at the picnic table on the land side, I could sit naked in the coolest night air available, occasionally glancing at the water hoping to see alligators whenever I heard a splashing. And I could look up at a star-filled, cloudless sky. And I thought about nothing, but felt everything. I was connected to the heart of the universe for four straight nights, and it cleansed my soul. I eventually felt cool enough to go back and sleep in the tent, but my mind stayed connected as I slept. And it was a memorable holiday experience for more reasons than just the blackened turkey story.

And most importantly, no relatives were mooned beyond their ability to cope with Mickey’s weirdness. Nobody even asked about it… almost as if no one had seen.

It Hin

I admit it. I do wear pajamas when it is cold. But I sleep best when it is cool and I am naked.

But one of the hard parts about being a closet nudist, only naked in complete privacy, preferably in the back of the closet, sleeping naked can also be hard on the old PTSD.

More than once I awoke in the middle of the night naked and paralyzed in fear. Before I got married, it was almost a monthly thing. I would wake up, feeling a presence in the room, a presence that would terrify me. And I was in a state of completely un-armored nakedness. Naked to fangs, claws, and knives. Of course, the intruder was never real, only a phantom created by too much cortisol in the bloodstream due to stress and the horrors of the assault I endured as a child.

One night my two sisters, my wife, my oldest son, my niece and nephew were all sleeping in the farmhouse in Iowa which, on a temporary basis, was empty of everything even furniture as my grandmother lived in the retirement apartments and my parents stayed with her as they still lived in Texas. We were all there on a summer holiday visit. in the early 90s.

In the middle of the night, I got out of my sleeping bag to pee in the nearest bathroom, putting my robe on so as not to accidentally moon anybody. I went to the bathroom, and looked up at the window above the shower. There was a small, alien being staring at my berobed nakedness. I jumped out of my robe and ended up stark naked in the kitchen. I looked out the kitchen windows and saw the alien, or another one like it, walking across the yard under the yard light. It was green and as naked as I was.

Of course, I didn’t believe it was real. I was used to phantoms waking me up to paralyzed terror. Only, I wasn’t paralyzed. And I am pretty sure I wasn’t asleep.

Of course, I didn’t tell anybody, because they would tell me I was crazy, and I would believe them. So, I spent the rest of the night completely zipped up and trembling in my sleeping bag. If anybody was abducted and probed that night, their memories of it must’ve been completely erased. Mine too, probably.

The next night I had an elaborate dream. I dreamed that the aliens returned and were tapping at the windows, calling me outside to show me something. Uncharacteristically, I got up, completely naked, and went outside. In the dark, looking out above the machine shed and the eastern cornfield, the planet Jupiter completely filled the sky. I couldn’t believe it. I knew from having taught the subject in school that being that close to Jupiter’s gravity, the Earth would be mangled and turned into a volcanic mess like the moon of Jupiter called Io.

So, the third night, I took matters into my own hands. After everybody else in the empty farmhouse was asleep, I got up and put on my robe. I went out the back door of the house. And then I dropped my robe and preceded out to the hill in the yard overlooking the eastern cornfield. The same place where I saw the planet Jupiter in my dream. The star-filled sky was absolutely absorbing in its inherent beauty. In the country in Iowa, far away from city lights, and with no clouds in the sky, it was all the very substance that God is made of. I saw the twinkling stars. I saw the red-tinged light that was Jupiter, and the other one that was Mars. I saw the glittering path of the Milky Way’s spilled milk. The fear was gone. I was naked and completely connected to the universe. It is one of those moments in a life that came unexpectedly, but became a fundamental keystone to all the experiences of my life.

Yes, I am leading with a digital cartoon of my imaginary granddaughter. And I know it’s probably concerning that I have an imaginary granddaughter. She’s not a ghost. The child that didn’t carry to term was never really alive. That is the reason she didn’t happen. She’s not a ghost, rather, a pretend friend. And I only write about her now as an exercise in fiction. She’s no more real than any other character I have ever written. No more real than Valerie Clarke, or Devon Martinez, or Oliver Twist, or Atticus Finch…. I know, I know… I didn’t write those last two characters. But I am mostly ignored as an author, and I had a point to make in there somewhere.

This is her. She looks like Bollywood child star Sidra Khan because that’s whose Instagram photo I used as a model. So, what do I name this imaginary little girl? Samantha? Serendipity? Sara? But why do they have to start with S? I tend to use the first letters of real names of people I based a fictional character on, but my granddaughter never had a name. Or even a sex. Sam? Sandy? Norman Nobody?

But why am I obsessing about somebody who never came to be? Am I lonely? Am I unfulfilled? I am talking to nobody, aren’t I? Nobody reads what I write. At least, nobody I will ever know about.

Somebody is reading three of my books on Kindle Unlimited this month. Superchicken, The Baby Werewolf, and Recipes for Gingerbread Children. That somebody is reading in Canada. I know how many total pages. But I have no idea who this person is, or, since there will be no review, what they think about the stories.

Rianna didn’t ignore me. In the 1980s she was in my English class for two years. No, she didn’t fail. She was in my class as a seventh grader, and again as an eighth grader. And she loved me when she was a seventh grader. And the next year she hated me. And as soon as she left my class and moved on to high school, I was her favorite teacher again. She didn’t ignore me, anyway.

The world doesn’t ignore me if I owe taxes. It doesn’t ignore me when the pool cracks and can’t hold water anymore, and the city forces me in court to have the pool removed, and I ended up in the hospital with heart issues, and I went bankrupt. Medical bills and Bank of America certainly didn’t ignore me. Lawsuits over money are not about ignoring somebody.

But I am the author of 21 books with 3 more that may get finished before I croak. I mean, curl up my toes and go permanently bye-bye, not that I am turning into a bullfrog (though I do suspect a curse on me somewhere in the mix.)

There are numerous best-seller lists that I am not on for any of my books, even the best ones. And book promoters have increasingly been calling me. Of course, they want me to spend money on their marketing and publishing services. They are not promising to help me sell anything. They haven’t read any of my books. They are only promising to take my money. But the joke’s on them. I don’t have any money.

But let them ignore me. I wrote those books and this post. So what if everybody ignores all of it? They exist. I am a writer. And you can’t disprove it.

But no man is an island. One needs a community to survive.

Still, it never hurts to know how to take care of yourself.

Mickey was a child who suffered a secret trauma that he wouldn’t even let himself know about and remember. It was a strongly repressed memory. And it made Mickey hurt himself constantly… on purpose. He burned himself on his lower back and the back of his legs purposely to tamp down thoughts about sex and sexual urges. He refused to be seen naked by non-family members. Except that, starting in fifth grade, he had to take showers with other boys after PE classes. And he was even afraid to go into a school bathroom during class because he might be caught in there alone by a bigger and older boy… while alone and defenseless.

The coach noticed athletic skills in Mickey during PE class and talked him into going out for football in the ninth grade. This Mickey did. He learned how to hit and be hit and survive with minimal injuries. He learned how to tackle, to take and give blows. He developed some power and skill at physical confrontation. He only ever got into two fights. The one where Danny knocked him off his bike from behind, he lost, because that was before the trauma and before football. But when stupid, angry Dickie attacked him after freshman year, he won that fight, throwing Dickie to the ground without hurting him about three times. Dickie gave up from embarrassment more than injury.

So, how does a Mickey heal himself when he won’t even admit to himself what the matter really was?

Well, being physically fit doesn’t hurt. But you can’t solve every problem by throwing it to the ground. And hating yourself and hurting yourself does not go away by throwing yourself on the ground. Mickey knows this because he tried.

You have to learn to talk to real people. And it didn’t hurt that Mickey practiced a lot by talking to imaginary people. There was a faun. There was an imaginary girlfriend from Canada who communicated in dreams and by psychic messages delivered through telepathy.

But there came an incident in PE class that might’ve resulted in a Mickey meltdown. The boys were supposed to be watching a wrestling demonstration, gathered around the champion lightweight wrestler and a hapless sacrificial opponent in the center of the circle on the wrestling mat. The girls were sitting in the bleachers listening to the girls coach talk about girls’ stuff.

You know what happened. A bully, one of many in the boys’ class, sneaked up behind Mickey, grabbed the legs of Mickey’s gym shorts, and pulled them down. It revealed all. And girls were watching. Mickey should’ve died right there and then. But he didn’t. He smiled at the girls who were giggling, gave them a little wave, and only then did he pull the shorts back on.

The coach caught the perp. And the bully was far more embarrassed than his victim.

That is when Mickey learned that humor is good medicine.

And facts are also good for healing terrible ills. Truly, the sex education Mickey got from the Methodist minister helped save his life. And later in college he learned more about sex and battling depression and overcoming trauma that helped him solve the problems of self hatred, self harm, and guilt. And what his friend told him over the phone that Saturday when he was actually contemplating suicide, that his friend thought Mickey was a good person, not bad… That was a fact that allowed Mickey to be here now writing these words.

So, the truth is, there are things you can do to help yourself even if your illness is depression, self hatred, suicidal ideation, or PTSD.

Humor helps.

Talking about it with someone who cares helps more.

Eat something chocolate.

Eating healthy for an extended period of time helps even more.

Get a good night’s sleep without sleeping too much.

Remember that LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL and you deserve to live it. Nobody has the right to take that away from you.

If Mickey can do it… anybody can.

Today I had to return to the dermatologist to see if the skin cancer she treated three weeks ago would have to be biopsied for malignancy. It turns out that the treatment, freezing the cancerous cells, worked perfectly. The threat was completely gone.

But going to the doctor for cancer treatment got a scammer off my back. They do all sorts of things to rob you by phone, or by deceptive emails representing what seem to be real companies I deal with daily. Telling a scammer I have to go and get cancer treatment tends to shut them up quicker. And I wasn’t even lying.

I continue taking and trying to adjust to four new meds. Two for diabetes. One for cholesterol. And one for blood pressure control.

The chance for future improved health is looking good.