October 25, 2023 · 1:41 am

Am I Now a Doomer?

I was born in the middle of the 1950’s. So, I am a Boomer. (Born as part of the World War II baby boom.)

I am philosophically a pessimist. So, I am a Gloomer. (Someone who believes that what is most likely to happen is the worst thing that can happen, therefore I always prepare for the worst.)

I like to investigate and play around with conspiracy theories. So, I am a Rumor-Lover. (Though I don’t declare anything absolutely true without absolute proof. Unlike Alex Jones, I am still in pursuit of whether Oswald acted alone and whether 9-11 wasn’t an inside job.)

And I have no faith that the monkey-flinging billionaires will give up polluting with fossil fuels to make short-term profits long enough to save life on Planet Earth from global warming. So, I am a Doomer. (Yes, we really are on a path to extinguish life on Earth even though we have the technology to mitigate and reform it.)

If I sing it,

“I’m a Boomer!”

“I’m a Gloomer!””

“I’m a Rumor-Loving Doomer!”

“We are dying… everyone!”

I have confidence that the human race will survive what’s coming. But it won’t be a fair thing. Those most likely to survive in their Mars colony or underground and undersea cities are the wealthy monkey flingers who caused the problem. Billions are going to die. The world population will be greatly reduced and forced to evolve biologically… probably with the aid of science. I know the clean energy technology is available to solve the world’s problems. But I also know that vast piles of wealth in billionaire tax havens corrupt the wealthy sons and daughters of fat money hogs. It makes them incompetent. Something their servants will kill them for when the small groups of survivors will have secured their existence.

So, I sing my Doomer song. You guessed it. To the tune of “The Joker” by the Steve Miller Band.

Do I think what I think is inevitable?

No. But I will be living out my life doing everything in my power to grow trees, clean trash out of everywhere but the proper receptacles, and curse the bones of those dead old billionaires who did this to us. I hope the Devil puts some extra hot coals under John D Rockefeller in the seventh circle of Hell.

I will be writing and drawing as much as I can until the end of me. It will probably come long before the rest of you face that final chess game with the Reaper. And I don’t expect my work is going to save any of you. But it will help me make meaning out of my life.

I hope I am wrong about everything for the sake of the children.

But this old pessimist is rarely shown by life to be wrong.

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October 24, 2023 · 12:54 am

Divining Rods, Ouija Boards, and Making Up My Own Danged Mind

How do you foretell the future? Simply put, you don’t. But if you approach each new day, each new week, or each new set of circumstances without a plan and a rough idea of the near future, you are even more of a hopeless fool than Mickey is.

While it is true that a crystal-ball connection to the future would be really handy for figuring out what to do next with our little lives, it is also provably true that crystal balls, Ouija boards, and divining rods don’t actually work. Statistically even the best users of these fortune-telling devices are no better at foretelling the future than are well-informed guessers.

Ghosts are not provably real. You cannot actually talk to them. Not even in a graveyard at midnight with a dead cat to throw at the devil.

Oh, and that reminds me, the devil is not provably real either.

But I admit to talking to the dead.

My Grandma Beyer was one of the wisest people I knew in my childhood. She advised my Dad who was her son. She was a guide for the Beyer side of the family. And I talk to her a lot when I have a tough decision to make.

In 2017 I irrationally made a commitment to write for a nudist website. The article assigned was to go to a nudist park or resort and write about my first-time experience there. Of course, getting my wife to go along with her RV camper was out of the question. She was a Jehovah’s Witness in good standing then, and was sure that nakedness in a group was a terrible sin. But I had known nudists back in the 1980s when a previous girlfriend’s sister was living in a clothing-optional apartment complex in Austin, Texas. We visited there a number of weekends. I never actually stayed there or got nude while visiting. I saw naked people there, male, female, and children. And after my eyes popped out on the first visit, I picked them up, put them back in, and learned a lot about nudists while at the same time turning down all invitations… which I could do because my parents were living nearby, and I could stay with them and keep all my clothes on. But the nudist website assignment weighed heavily on me. Grandma Beyer had been the one that threatened to spank me before I was supposed to take a bath at her house because I wanted to run around the house naked rather than get in the tub with my sister. I was five at the time, not in high school… honest. So, she was the one I consulted when it came time to decide if I would actually go to a nudist park and be naked in front of other people just because I had made a commitment to a writing assignment.

Of course, she had been among the no-longer-living for fifteen years when I asked her about it.

The thing is, however, that I knew my grandmother well enough to know what she would say as I basically discussed it with her memory rather than her ghost. I even saw what facial expressions she used as she explained that it was more important to keep my word than it was to be a little bit embarrassed. And besides, it was not like I was going to an orgy or anything. Nudists are merely ordinary people who are dedicated to the belief that getting your vitamin D directly from the sun without any clothes between you and nature was good for you.

So, I made the visit, got naked, and wrote the article, as well as articles on this blog that were used on other nudist websites as well. It is how I came to be a member of the nudist writing community on Twitter. And that has helped me promote my books whether there were nudists in them or not.

Even with consulting a Ouija Board you are not really talking to ghosts. You get an answer from somebody with their fingers on the piece of plastic that picks the letters and is accessing their unconscious mind, or even their conscious mind if they are a bit of a dershenbugle (a word which doesn’t mean anything at all, just like the answer they picked.)

I often use a coin-flip to make decisions, adding an element of total chance to the decision I am making. (I admit, that’s how the decision to accept the writing assignment from the nudist blog was made.) If either answer to the question being asked is acceptable, but one causes a bit of anxiety, I flip a coin. Not just one coin. I throw three. Yes is three heads. No is three tails. Ten straight no decisions is indication not to decide at that time. In truth, this only works for me because it forces me to take an arbitrary amount of time to think about the decision. And often, I toss three heads when I have already decided to say no. And then I go with no.

So, divining the future is silly superstition, and I don’t do superstition. But that is not to say I don’t try to divine the obstacles ahead and prepare for them. And what looks like Mickey being an idiot about consulting coins or other signs, is really only Mickey being only slightly an idiot as he makes up his own danged mind.

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October 23, 2023 · 1:08 am

Fascination

I am falling apart. My health is poor and continuing to fail. My memory is suffering from an inability to remember the names of things. I find myself in the kitchen having gone in for a specific purpose, and not being able to remember what that purpose was. That is not to say I am not coping. I have quite a lot of adaptability and significant problem-solving skills. But that will eventually become a losing battle. Especially if I get the virus… any virus. So, what am I going to talk about with a dissolving brain and an hourglass of lifeforce swiftly running out? Fascination. I am fascinated by the details of the process. Like Mr. Spock, I find practically everything, “Fascinating!”

Birds and butterflies

My childhood fascinations turned into obsession first around natural things. When my mother would go to Vey Osier’s Beauty Salon, Vey had this fascinating parrot that was probably a hundred years old and knew how to swear really, really foully. I remember that being the only reason I was willing to go there and wait for Mom to get her hair fussed up (What my Grandpa Aldrich, her father, used to call it.)

I remember waiting for hours to hear that bird say the magic F-word or the horrible S-word. Or even the zillion other bad words I didn’t know anything about when I was seven. And, of course, I never did. The bird was mute the whole time during who-knows-how-many visits. But I did get to look endlessly at that green parrot’s amazing nutcracker bill that Vey always assured us would snap our fingers off like biting a salted pretzel if we got them anywhere close to the bill.

And when I was nine I was given as a present a plastic model kit of a Golden-Crowned Kinglet (the bird in that first picture). My relatives knew I was a burgeoning artist since my teachers constantly complained about all the skeletons, crocodiles, and monsters I drew in the margins of my school workbooks. So, I had a plastic bird to paint with all the necessary paints, but no idea what the bird looked like. We had to go all the way to Mason City to Grandma Beyer’s house because we called up there and checked, and, sure enough, there was a colored picture in the K volume of her Collier’s Encyclopedia. I painted it so accurately, the danged thing looked almost alive.

And if you have ever seen any of my butterfly posts, you know I became a butterfly hunter before ever entering junior high school, where Miss Rubelmacher, the rabid seventh-grade science teacher, made that obsession a hundred times worse. (She didn’t actually have rabies, just a reputation of requiring excessively hard-to-find life-science specimens like a nasturtium that bloomed in October in Iowa, or a Mourning Cloak butterfly.

I was able to find for her numerous Red-Spotted Purples like the one in the picture. I got them off the grill of Dad’s Ford, as well as in Grandpa Aldrich’s grove. And I eventually caught a pair of Mourning Cloaks as well on Grandpa Aldrich’s apple trees, though not until summer after seventh grade was over for me. I could tell you about my quest to catch a Tiger Swallowtail, too. But that’s an entirely different essay, written for an entirely different thematic reason.

Needless to say, my bird fascination led me to become an amateur bird-watcher with a great deal of useless naturalist information crammed into my juvenile bird-brain about birds. Especially Cardinals. And my fascination with butterflies opened my eyes to a previously invisible world of fascinating and ornately-decorated bugs. (Of course, I should’ve said “insects” instead of “bugs” since I absolutely did learn the difference.) And I still to this day know what a Hairstreak Butterfly looks like, what a Luna Moth is (Think Lunesta Commercials,) and how you have to look at the underside of the lower wings to correctly identify a Moonglow Fritillary Butterfly.

During my lifetime, my fascinations have become legion. I became obsessed with the comic books done by artist Wally Wood, especially Daredevil. I became obsessed with Disney movies, especially the animated ones like The Rescuers, The Jungle Book, Pinocchio, and Fantasia. I rode the bucking bronco of a fascination with the Roswell Crash (and the actual alien space ships I am almost certain the U.S. Army recovered there.) And so many other things that it would make this essay too long, and would probably bore you into a death-like coma. So, here’s what I have learned by being fascinated with my own fascinations;

  1. You do not want to play me in a game of Trivial Pursuit for money, even now that my memory is like swiss cheese.
  2. I have a real ability to problem-solve because I know so many useless details that can be combined in novel ways to come up with solutions to problems.
  3. I can write interesting essays and engaging novels because I have such a plethora of concrete details and facts to supplement my sentences and paragraphs with.
  4. It can be really, really boring to talk to me about any of my fascinations unless I happen to light the same color of fire in your imagination too. Or unless you arrived at that same fascination before I brought it up.

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October 22, 2023 · 2:14 am

Working It Out in Colored Pencil and Computer Nonsense

Here I am making progress with the new picture project. I have had to rethink details on the fly as my arthritic hands make flubs in ink. Unlike on the computer, I had to fudge a new crook to the elbow and push a flower’s edge under the nearby flub instead of over the top.

This fast and furious edit for possibilities to redirect the problem was created with the AI Mirror that suggested possible changes to the finished project.

Here is my finished colored-pencil drawing. This is the best I can do with my hands and my color blind eyes. It’s not that bad. Still, I can now use the AI program that will obviously one day become a Terminator android murder-bot to sort out the crappy stuff and make it better.

Still not perfect. It tried to turn my black-eyed susans into sunflowers. But I like the highlights and the back lighting on the hair.

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October 21, 2023 · 1:42 am

Practice and Progress

Here is the pen and ink drawing that is my latest work in progress. I drew it first in pencil as a structural sketch with details penciled on top of it. I then inked the best lines and then took the excess pencil marks away with an eraser. I haven’t scanned it yet. What you see here is a photo of the drawing with my phone camera, hence the gray color rather than white. I will put the colored pencil on it next and show you the result when done. I will then turn it into something digital by putting the scan into my phone to use the digital art app and the AI editor.

This is some playing around with the photo of the pen and ink copy messed on with the digital art tools and the AI editor (which tends to give my drawing an even more Manga look than it had originally.)

This is the photo of Sally Field I used for the previous practice.

This is the result of loading it into my digital art app and tracing over it with my electronic stylus on my touchscreen phone. I know it doesn’t look like her. I couldn’t get the eyes to look right, and I settled for the smiling eyes that my AI editor gave me.

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October 20, 2023 · 2:39 am

Five Reasons Why

Yes, I published the book that has all my closet skeletons in it. I kept the secret of being a victim of a sexual assault from the age of ten to the age of thirty before finally sharing my pain with a girlfriend as described in the book. I tell about my entire transformation of someone totally shamed by my body to someone who embraced being a nudist. So, I have reasons for publishing this book.

  1. I needed to get the worst of the secrets that chewed on my innards for over fifty years out of the closet to do their informative skeleton dance for any who might need to hear it. My mother and father both died without ever knowing what happened to me as a child. In 2020 and 2021 And not because I hadn’t revealed it to anyone. My sisters both knew. But they didn’t read my books and they really didn’t need to face that sadness since I had dealt with it myself years before.

2. I have collected many artworks that I have done over the years with my fascination with the nude human form revealed in it. I needed to air out some of that art. I got the added benefit of digital art coming along to help me translate my pictures into more realistic and dynamic art, unaffected by my arthritis.

3. I needed a place to put more of my truly terrible poetry. This book is a place to put some of what I have learned about blank verse by my fascination and obsession with Walt Whitman.

I talk about Walt Whitman, other artists and writers, and my personal philosophy of education here.

4. This book was also a place to experiment with AI tools and digital art in ways I had never done before. This picture above is created with a photo of a boy with clothes on, some drawing on top of it to change the face and alter the details necessary to make him a nude figure. Of course, my arthritis left numerous flubs and smirches all over it, so I used the AI Mirror program to turn the whole thing into a much better version with the colors better blended and the awkward lines smoothed out. I have to admit, though, the correctable lines and color swatches go down more easily than colored pencil lines. See the differences in quality in the arthritic version below, uncorrected by the AI editor?

5. And the most important reason of all is that this book purges my soul and gives me peace to face the last years of my life with. I am old enough to seriously think about how I want to face the end of everything for me. And what I really wanted to do is go into the coming night bare of all secrets and mental baggage. Just like any good nudist, I am hiding nothing at all as I stride to the end of the story..

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October 20, 2023 · 1:03 am

Rememberries

Yes,

I am stupidly planning to do it again. A book of essays like I did before, but now with fewer of my best essays to choose from. So, essays with fewer calories, but also less nutrition. Laughing Blue was a success from the point of view of what I wrote it for. I know people generally don’t read essays for fun.

But I write them for fun. And for better health. Healthy thinking is as necessary as a proper diet.

You see, I am definitely not in good health. I retired from my job as a school teacher six years ago because of poor health. It was a job I truly loved and defined me as a human bean (by which I mean a human being, but with a careful balance of protein and carbohydrates.) Being retired is more restful. But you reach a point where doing nothing leads to sitting and rotting. I find I need the extra vitamin C you get from cooking essays with a lot of berries in them. Specifically rememberries.

Okay, I know that is a rather dumb food pun. But the vitamin C is still there to boost my immune system and make me feel better. Vitamin C for Comedy… Clarity… Creativity… and Cartoons.

So, let’s start with a berry from the 1960s. Let’s start with Moonberries.

I was twelve years old when the Apollo Program landed Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and the LEM Eagle on the Moon at Tranquility Base. I was very much a child of the Space Age. I had a model kit of the Apollo 11 from Revell, all the pieces in white plastic. The tiny struts on the Lunar Expeditionary Module were maddeningly breakable, and even would warp under the dissolving power of Testor’s airplane glue. I spent hours with sticky fingers putting that together in December of 1968 and January of 1969. I was twelve, in the middle of my wonder years, and totally obsessed with the flavor of the whole Moonberry experience.

For several years through Gemini and then Apollo we watched the story unfold on our old black-and-white Motorola television set. All of it narrated by Walter Cronkite and Wally Schirra. All of it… space walks, docking maneuvers, orbit reports, a special Christmas message from Apollo 8, splashdowns bringing home heroes like Jim Lovell, Frank Borman, and Bill Anders… the man who had spoken the words;

“For all the people on Earth, the crew of Apollo 8 has a message we would like to send you.”

“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

“And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.

“And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, ‘Let there be light’: and there was light.

“And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.”

And then that late, late night when we all stayed up on July 20, 1969… And we knew they could fail and never come home again… We learned that with Grissom, White, and Chaffee on Apollo 1… That horrible fire… The somber funeral parade on TV that called to mind JFK and what befell him after he started the dream…

But no, we heard those words, “The Eagle has landed.”

And then later, “One small step for man… One giant leap for mankind.”

And then I knew it. For me, real life had finally begun.

I promise, there are more rememberries to come, and some might even be nutritious.

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October 19, 2023 · 1:31 am

Published Again, for Better or Worse

I am tempting fate and trying to publish this, my personal nudist’s guide to repairing your soul through naked meditation and transcendental experiences. It is filled with lots of bad poetry, secrets that are actually quite painful for me to reveal, and almost all of the naked pictures that I have been drawing for years and was able to spruce up with an AI program.

Nudes like this one were created from photos where the model actually wore clothing, then I painted all over it with my electronic stylus on my touch-screen phone and then cleaned it all up with an AI photo editor. I gave credit to the AI, the digital art tools, and the masterpieces of art I imitated and learned from.

It still has to be approved by the small gods of Amazon KDP. It is possible it will get rejected and my Amazon account will be dropped. That would be catastrophic. For me, at any rate. But I have reviewed much worse on Amazon Kindle. And my novels have survived some severe complaints.

Time will tell. It will be available through a link on this blog if I get lucky.

Turns out it was already approved as I published this post. That’s the fastest I have ever had a book approved by Amazon.

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October 19, 2023 · 1:00 am

Pictures In My Head

I do draw some pictures from models, photos, or other illustrations… but fantastical things that you can’t find a model for are what occur most often in my stupid head.

I was back in a classroom yesterday as a sub. 6th graders. It did look an awful lot like this, but I was holding another teacher’s giant pencil.
This is the ski-jump on Valwood Parkway in Farmer’s Branch. I merely changed the railroad tracks into a stream.
I taught all three of these kids when they were thirteen, but one in ’81, one in ’92, and one in ’94. Oh, and not on Mars.
No models were used in this picture, though I did know several blue children.
Done without a model, unless you believe 3″ tall fairies are a real thing.
No werewolf girls posed topless for this picture.
This classroom photo was entirely in my stupid old head, not in a school gymnasium full of snow.
Even the mountains in the background were drawn directly from my mind’s eye.
A lot of what I draw is merely emotional flim-floogery and provides a look inside of me that makes a portrait of me drawn even more naked and vulnerable than if I drew myself nude.

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October 18, 2023 · 1:37 am

Strawberry Fields

This foolish essay about berries that mean love to me is only partly inspired by the Beatles song, “Strawberry Fields Forever.” That’s because, of course, their song was only about meditating. In the lyrics they take you to the “Strawberry Fields where nothing is real… but it’s nothing to get hung up about…” They are talking about a blissful place of no worries where we all need to go. And then staying there forever.

This, of course, I could never do. Worrying about the future is tattooed on my behavioral imperatives in the dark part of my stupid old brain. And while I often found that place of no worries, and lingered there for a bit, I found you could never really get anything done if you stayed in that state of strawberry fields forever.

But don’t get me wrong, strawberries are a critical part of every healthy mental diet.

You see, my meditations on strawberries when I was a child of eight, nine, and ten centered on the strawberry patch at Great Grandma Hinckley’s place.

She was, as I incorrectly recall, slightly older than Jesus when I was that age. By that I mean, though she seemed museum-quality ancient to me, I had derived wisdom about life, love, and laughter from her before Sunday School taught me any of those things said in Jesus’s words.

And I was given the task of mowing her lawn in the little plot of land surrounding her little, tiny house in the Northern part of Rowan where I also lived and grew and celebrated Christmas and Halloween and Easter and the 4th of July. And though I was doing it because she was so old, I never even once thought she was too old and frail to do it herself. Grandma Hinckley’s willpower was a force of nature that could even quell tornados… well, I thought so anyway when I was eight. And she gave me a dollar every time I did the lawnmowing.

But there were other things she wanted done, and other things she wanted to teach me. There was the garden out back with the strawberry patch next to it. She wanted me to help with keeping the weeds and the saw grass and the creeping Charlie from overrunning the strawberries and choking them to death. (Creeping Charlie wasn’t an evil neighbor, by the way. He was a little round-leafed weed that grew so profusely that it prevented other plants from getting any sunlight on their own leaves, causing a withering, yellowing death by sunlight deprivation. I took my trowel to them and treated them like murderers. I showed them no mercy.)

And Grandma always reminded me not to be selfish and eat the very berries I was tending in the garden. She taught me that eating green strawberries (which are actually more yellow than green, but you know what I mean) was bad because they could give you a belly ache, a fact that that I proved to myself more than once (because eight-year-olds are stupid and learn slowly.) She also taught me that it is better to wait until you have enough strawberries to make a pie, or better yet, strawberry shortcake with whipped cream. She taught me that delayed gratification was more rewarding in the long run than being greedy in the short run and spoiling everything for everybody.

She always gave me a few of the ripe strawberries every time I helped her with them, even if I had eaten a few in the garden without permission. Strawberries were the fruit of true love. I know this because it says so in the strawberry picture. Even though I probably never figured out what true love really means.

My Great Grandma Nellie Hinckley was the foundation stone that my mother’s side of the family was built on. She was the rock that held us steadily in place during the thunderstorms, and the matriarch of the entire clan of Hinckleys and Aldriches and Beyers and other cousins by the dozens and grandchildren and great grandchildren and even great great grandchildren. I painted the picture of her in 1980 when she passed away. I gave it to my Grandma Aldrich, her second-eldest daughter. It spent three decades in Grandma’s upstairs closet because looking at it made Grandma too sad to be so long without her. The great grandchild in the picture with her is now a grandmother herself (though no one who has seen this picture knows who it is supposed to be because I painted her solely from memory and got it all wrong.) But Grandma Hinckley taught me what true love means. And true love has everything to do with how you go about taking care of the strawberry patch.

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