The most important reason for being a nudist, in my humble and mostly worthless opinion, is the simple act of sitting naked outdoors in the summer sunshine and taking the time to meditate. Not thinking deep thoughts. Not daydreaming. But real meditation. Emptying your mind of worry, plans, thoughts, and beliefs. Simply reaching out to the world around you with your senses, absorbing it all into your very being, and becoming one with everything under the sun.
Meditation is good for you even if you wear comfortable clothes while doing it. You have to do it right. Not reading a book. Not listening to the Bee Gees, or any other music with words in it. Just slowly stirring the head juice and thinking about nothing. It can be more refreshing, energizing. and renewing than sleep. It is a special mind power.
And it is even more powerful when you do it with no cloth barriers between you and the biological environment around you.
Being nude is really more about getting to intimately know yourself than anything else. And meditating in the nude is about knowing this in the deepest places inside your mind.
Self-reflection is the bane of stupid people. Essentially, they don’t want to risk encountering evidence that they actually are stupid. It would shatter their world to learn that they are idiots and most of what they believe is true is actually wrong. This fact goes a long way towards explaining why the Republican Party in its current form even exists, let alone the actions of the current mutant Cheetos monster that pilots their agenda and hates healthcare, the Special Olympics, and Puerto Rico.
So, if I am doing a self–reflection piece today, then that proves I am not a stupid person, right? What do you mean you agree with that? Yes, I can actually hear you mentally answering my questions as you read this. And if you believe that, then you have proven that even relatively smart people like you and I are capable of stupid thinking.
I believe in some stupid things, even though I think I am not stupid.
An example of this stupidity factor is my lingering belief that I am a nudist. I mean, I am rarely ever nude any more. I keep most of me covered up constantly because when my psoriasis plaques dry out they tend to flake and itch and force me to scratch to the point of infected bloody sores.
Obviously this is not totally a photograph from the 60’s. That does not make it a total lie either, though.
I have been pretty much accepted as a member of the nudist community on Twitter. I enjoy the artful pictures of nude people they share with me. And since I did a couple of blog posts for nudist websites, there are actually completely nude pictures of me available on the internet. I can be found on Truenudists.com for one, if your eyes can stand the horror. But I have only been to a nudist park, the Bluebonnet Nudist Park in Alvord, Texas. twice as an actual nudist. I can tell you, they were very hot days even though I was not wearing clothes. I am comfortable with nudity. I am comfortable around nude people. I fully accept it all as a non-sexual thing. But am I really a nudist? Or am I only playing at it? If you follow me on Twitter, then you know I don’t retweet pictures of naked people. I engage a lot with other writers there, and most of them are not also nudists, or even open-minded about naturism. I write about nudists in some of my books, but they are not about nudism, and most of them don’t even mention it. So, what good does it do me to think I am a nudist? Well, the very idea of it does a heckuva good job of embarrassing my wife and daughter. So, I do get some crazy-old-coot satisfaction out of it. Otherwise it simply proves that rational and otherwise intelligent people can be committed to irrational ideas.
I am also of the often mocked and ridiculed opinion that not only are alien beings from other worlds real, they are capable of space travel and have been visiting us for as long as there has been an us. I did not always believe this, however. Before I wrote my novelCatch a Falling Star I believed as Carl Sagan said on the original Cosmos that it is wrong to accept things without proof, and true results are testable. My novel was about aliens who watched a lot of Earther TV and learned to speak English from watching I Love Lucy reruns, I wanted to make the aliens different from humans, but at the same time, alike with humans in the most fundamental ways that translate easily into humor and relatability. Not all of my hero-characters were Earth humans.
Brekka the Telleron tadpole (also a nudist) with her friend Lester the man-eating plant (who only ate her once)
As I did research on the internet (a tool I didn’t have when I originally created the story in the 1970s), I found a ton of researchers and writers and con men and MUFON and the Disclosure Project and nuclear physicists and astronauts Gordon Cooper and Edgar Mitchell who were all believers and mostly not stupid. Wow! What a huge and complicated hoax! Why would anybody believe , based on so little tangible evidence, and so much contradictory evidence, that the government’s position could possibly be right? I learned that I now believed, until significant further proof comes along, that I believe stupidly in alien visitors.
Today’s self-reflection post has now proven that I am a stupid old coot who thinks he is a nudist and an insightful conspiracy theorist. But the results of my look into the mirror have not made me upset about my stupidity. Maybe I am simply satisfied nudism is healthy and the universe is more complex than I am capable of understanding. Whatever the case, that’s enough with the mirror for today. You have to keep such dangerous weapons out of the hands of clowns.
In the background of several of my novels, there lurk little people with magic powers. In this modern age of science they still exist, but are reduced in size to about three inches tall for the adults. As I am now working on a book set in their world, I am therefore using today’s post to elucidate what they are and categorize them a bit.
Butterfly Children is a nickname for the winged fairies. And most fairies not only have wings, but don’t wear clothing because, not only do shirts, jackets, jerkins, and such interfere with wings, but they, like me, prefer to be nude if possible.
The Butterfly Children are not really made of flesh and blood, but rather coherent magical energy. That is the reason they rarely become spellcasters themselves, but can lend their energies to the spell-casting Sylphs; witches, wizards, sorcerers, warlocks, liches, and some Storybooks.
They refer to us as “the Slow Ones” because we are easily fooled into not seeing them for what they are. They use concealing glammers to convince us that we are seeing a bug or a bird or a glare of sunlight instead of what they actually are. They also have the ability to allow slow ones to see them if they choose to voice the necessary spells. Some rare slow ones are able to see through their glammers and view them in spite of their wishes.
Sylphs and Elves : The Man-shaped Fey
Once, long ago, the Fey Children who looked human could pass themselves off as slow ones. The Elves, of course, had pointed ears to hide. But they looked like what we would call “regular people” because they were our size. But human science developed things that stop magical energies like brass or drain magical energies like iron and copper. The Fey became smaller and smaller. Things like discarded nails and lost pennies decreased the places where they could live and build homes.
Eli Tragedy (in the middle above) is an example of both an Elf (with pointed ears) and a magic-using Sorcerer. His apprentices, Bob and Mickey, are both Sylphs. Like Butterfly Children, many Sylphs would rather not wear clothes. Magic-using Sylphs and Elves learn to wear clothes because garments can be invested with protective spells.
Mickey is different than other Sylphs in that he has been bitten by a wererat and has been infected by lycanthropy. Since he is now an uncontrolled wererat, he constantly looks like a boy with a mouse head and tail, a fur-covered boy’s body, and paws instead of feet.
Sylphs can occur in many different non-manlike forms. The Mouse from Cornucopia is a Sylph in the form of an anthropomorphic mouse. Radasha, also seen to the left, is a Faun. Pixies, Nixies, Boggarts, Gremlins, Centaurs, Minotaurs, and other magical creatures have gotten far smaller since ancient times when human beings added greatly to the magical energy loose in the world through their imaginations, faiths, fears, nightmares, and dreams.
All of those magical creatures have odd and sometimes horrific shapes. You can see that in the insect-like Pixie to the right.
Storybooks : Immortals Amongst the Fey
The other Fey Children that need a special mention are the Storybooks like Silkie pictured in the acorn beret and leaf dress to the right. These lucky Sylphs, Elves, or other Fey Children who’ve been singled out by slow ones in their slow-ones’ books and literature are made magically immortal by the power of stories told by humans, especially those preserved by print. They no longer die. They can no longer be killed or grievously wounded.
General Tuffaney Swift is another good example of a Storybook. He exists as an immortal because some of his early adventures, were overheard and written down in stories about Tom Thumb. He was instrumental in bringing Grandma Gretel and her daughter, Anneliese, into the Fey World. She is responsible through her magical baking skills for the entire races of Gingerbread Children and Cookie Monsters.
So, there’s a brief overview of the Kingdom of Tellosia and the World of the Fey Children.
The book below is free in ebook form from Friday through Tuesday starting this weekend.
If you practice drawing regularly, you will find that sometimes when you pick up your colored pencils, you can end up with a picture just like this. And you don’t have to tell me it is good. I know. And if you don’t see what I mean, I’m not going to read your comment anyway.
I am trying to cut down on political notions and noodling in this blog. It is like sugar to a humor writer. The easy laughs are sweet, but if you are diabetic, they will eventually build up and kill you.
But between Twitter-tweeting twit-wits and Facebook false-fact fools, I keep getting drawn back in. The gang of kids I grew up with in Iowa are seriously infected with Tea Party propaganda now that they are old coots like me, and continue to vote for Teabagger trolls (And I mean literal trolls. Steve King, Congressman from Iowa, has green skin and lives under a bridge… and maybe eats foolish children when they try to cross) for public office. And of course, I live now in Texas where gun-toting cowboys look at you intently to find any possible reason to shoot you and then thank Jesus if you are fool enough to give them one (like admitting to be mostly a Democrat in your political persuasion). They want to argue anything and everything I post on Facebook. Apparently even my bird pictures and cat videos politically offend them.
Oooh! This one really offends Teabaggers… especially the ones who make $25/hr or less.
Can you pick out the Trump voters in this line? All of them maybe?
And I am not suggesting that people who voted Republican in the last election aren’t as smart as my side. I waited until now in this essay to say that, because the childhood friends and family members in that group who read my blog will have all stopped reading by this point. I really don’t need to give them any more ammunition for Facebook and dinner table arguments.
But my side of the table are not wholly guilt free.
I regularly tweet or post things like these, innocently believing these heroes of the heart and mind have universal appeal because they champion truth and science and facts. But I become alarmed when I learn how much Bill Nye offends them. They tell me, “That guy is not a scientist! He has no right to argue for climate change issues or the non-existence of God. He’s just a TV guy.” And, I suppose they have a point. I mean, his extensive education and background in engineering, or his years in television promoting science to kids in research-based creative ways, doesn’t necessarily make him an expert on all science. And Neil DeGrasse Tyson is an astrophysicist. He doesn’t have a degree in EVERYTHING. And when I point out that their so-called experts on climate-change denial from Fox News cannot even claim to be TV weathermen, they are further put out by my brain-bashing bullying way of using my superior knowledge of science to put them down. Okay, I get it. I am not being careful enough of your feelings. (Oh, I forgot, you stopped reading this a while back.)
But the point of this is, we have to stop listening to and electing stupid people, while at the same time being a bit nicer to each other. We have to approach the discussion with the notion that you yourself may not be totally right about everything, and you may actually learn something by talking about it. (Which is, of course, no problem for me since I really don’t know anything for certain and need to learn practically everything as if I were still four years old.)
Okay, Bill, I get it. I am probably wrong about that too.
He’s just finished proofreading The Necromancer’s Apprentice again. 12 errors corrected and the book successfully republished. Comma errors, typos, and poor-word-choice corrections can make a guy sad.
And Mickey feels awful all the time. Every joint hurts with arthritis. He hasn’t been remembering to eat on time, so his diabetes is filling his head with angry bees. He’s lonely because every friend he used to have was a teacher too, and now that he’s retired they are all far away and long ago, teaching in other schools, retired too, or dead.
And he’s depressed.
Dertfentwinkle, the Necromancer’s Apprentice
And then he remembers. He’s a storyteller. His head is full of imaginary people to talk to. And most of them are funny. And they can walk around naked if he wants them to be nudists. And in a sense, he is like God in that way. He is in control of everything when he’s writing a story.
But, ironically, he can write very little because of all of things that make him sad.
The word for it is Paffooney. I know that is not a real word. It is a Mickian word. Kinda like the word “Mickian”. It is entirely made up gibberish, made up by Mickey, and used to mean an artwork made by the hand of Mickey. So I can’t really explain it. I have to show you what it basically is.
This is a Paffooney. It is inspired by the incredibly unbelievable time in Mickey’s life when they let Mickey be a teacher in Texas. It has no other relationship to reality. Chinese girls in Texas generally do not have manga eyes and blue hair, and while Hispanic girls have been known to eat pencils, they never bring their own notebook paper to class. They always borrow. So there is the basic formula. Colored-pencil nonsense drawn by Mickey and attached somehow to a story.
This Paffooney has a self-explanatory story embedded in it. It is obvious this is the story of an average family car trip in Texas. Notice how they demonstrate the Texas State highway motto of, “Drive friendly”.
And this Paffooney is a Mickian recurring nightmare about a duck with teeth. Silly Mickey, ducks don’t have teeth in real life!
And moose bowling is a Paffooney that needs no explanation… or does it? Well, never mind. I have forgotten what it is for anyway.
And this oil-painting Paffooney speaks volumes about a philosophy of life. See the pilot giving the viewer a thumbs up? And that isn’t a parachute on his back. They didn’t have parachutes in World War I. It is a message pouch with German war plans in it. I even painted it with a bratwurst sandwich inside for the pilot’s lunch. Don’t I do great detail work? But he will have to eat it quickly before he reaches the ground.
And this is me teaching an ESL class. When you teach English to non-English speakers in Texas, you get to hold the big pencil. And it helps to be a big white rabbit.
And this is a science fiction Paffooney, although the science is questionable. Don’t doubt that the flower-people of the planet Cornucopia are real, though. And Mai Ling, the psionic space ninja really can elongate her arm to get maximum thrust into her left-handed karate chops.
And we end for today with the Paffooney of a stupid boy. He’s not really me. Not really. And I don’t even know who gave him the black eye. So it can’t be me. So maybe he is not so stupid. You can’t say that about somebody you don’t know and is not even you.
So, now do you know what a Paffooney is? No? Me neither. But if you Google images with the words “Beyer Paffooney” you can see a lot more of them. Nobody else uses that word but little ol’ me.
Yep, I was an Iowa boy. I sang that stupid song with pride, though we never once called our home State “Ioway” outside of that song. I have driven a tractor, made money for pulling buttonweeds out of soybean fields with my own two hands, watched the wind ripple the leaves in the cornfields like waves on bright green ocean water, and hid in the basement when we believed a tornado might come and destroy our house. Life in Iowa is made up of these things and many more, don’t ya know.
And of course, I learned to tell corny jokes along the way. That’s a must for a quick-wit-hick from the sticks. Pepsi and Coke and Mountain Dew are “pop”, and when you have to “run down to the store” you get in your car. You don’t have to do it by foot. And other Iowans know this. You don’t even get the raised eyebrows and funny stares that those things evoke when said aloud in Carrollton, Texas. You have to explain to Texans that “you guys” is how Iowegian speakers say “y’all”. Language is plain and simple when you speak Iowegian. You have to follow the rule of “Only speak when you’re spoken to”. Iowans are suspicious when somebody talks first, especially if you haven’t known that somebody for their entire life. That’s what an Iowan calls a “stranger” . “Frank is from Iowa Falls, and he’s only lived here for twelve years, so he’s still a stranger around here.” So large portions of Iowegian conversations are made up of grunts and nods. Two Iowegians can talk for hours saying only like ten words the entire time. “Yep. You bet.”
But that only applies when you are outside the confines of the local cafe or restaurant or beanery or eatery or other nesting places for the Iowegian gossiping hens and strutting roosters. Inside these wordy-walled exchanges for farm lore and lies there is no end to to the talking. And because the mouths are already in motion anyway, there is also no end to the eating. You are not too likely to see skinny farmers. But farms and farmers definitely affect the quality of conversations. In Iowa you have to learn how to stuff good grub in your pie hole in spite of the fact that farmers have decided to compare in detail the aromas associated with putting cow poop in the manure spreader (back in the day, of course) and mucking out a layer of toxic chicken whitewash from the chicken coop. Perfect topic to accompany that piece of lemon meringue pie (which is the perfect color to illustrate the chicken side of the argument). And, of course, if you have a family of health-care and service professionals like mine (mother was a registered nurse for forty years), you get to add to that discussions of perforated gall bladders, kidney resections, and mean old biddies that have to be helped on and off the bedpans. You must develop a strong tolerance and an even stronger stomach, or you are doomed to be skinny and underfed.
And since Iowegian is a language that is very simple, direct, and mostly about poop, they practically all voted for Trump. Like him they never use transitions more than starting sentences with “And” or “But”, so they understand him mostly, even though there is no chance in H-E-double-hockey-sticks that he understands them. It’s what allowed them to elect a mouth-breathing troglodyte like Steve King to the House of Representatives, and I can say that because they have no idea what “troglodyte” means, and will probably think it is a complement because it has so many syllables. Insults have four letters. Politics in Iowa is simple and direct too. Basically, if you are not a Republican you are wrong. Of course, somehow the State managed to go for Obama over Romney, but that was probably because, to an Iowan, neither one was right, and Mormons are wrong-er than anybody.
So there’s my brief and beautiful bouquet of Iowegian words and their explanatory weegification. I know there is a lot more to say about how Iowegians talk. But I can’t say it here because my short Iowegian attention span is already wandering. So let me wrap it up with one final weegification (yes, that is a made-up word, not a one-time typo mistake).
The owl-guy had demanded that Maria work for another half hour dusting toys that apparently hadn’t been moved even an inch in five decades. And when she was done, the toys seemed to have accumulated the exact same amount of dust as they had possessed before she started cleaning.
Stan had spent time talking and prodding the weird old man all the time Maria had been working, and then when it was over, the private dick wouldn’t even tell her what they had been gossiping about.
She went straight to her room, her laptop and her cell phone, as soon as she was home.
Mom was no help. She had gone to bed the moment that she had drug herself home from work.
And then… the phone rang.
“Hello?”
“Ma-Maria? C-can I talk to you… please?”
“Who is this?”
A little girl was crying into the phone on the other end.
“Hannah? Is that you?”
“Yeah… you said I could… call you?”
“Of course, I did. But what’s the matter?”
“I have to tell you something. Something terrible.”
“What is it?”
“It’s something terrible… that I did.”
“What did you do?”
“If I tell you… You will never forgive me.”
“Yes, I will. I promise.”
“You can’t. Daddy won’t forgive me if I tell him.”
“Please, Hannah. You can tell me. And maybe I can help you tell your daddy in a way that will make him forgive you…”
“Really? You would do that? For me?”
“I promise. I like you, Hannah. You are a nice little girl.”
“No, I’m not. I made a deal with a Lonely One.”
“A Lonely One?”
“She was a ghost… err… something… inside a really cool doll. And she… she was…” Hannah dissolved in tears, unable to finish the sentence.
“You can talk to me, Hannah. You can tell me anything. I wish you were here right now. I could hold you… hug you. Make you feel better.”
“The doll was made of hard white stuff. And she was beautiful… She looked just like me… but her hair was all white.”
“And the doll did something?”
“She asked me for something.”
“What did she want?”
“She asked if she could play with my mom. She said if I just let her play with Mom for a while, she could make Mommy love me better… She said… But she lied to me.”
“What was the lie?”
“She was supposed to give Mommy back to me. But when… when she was done playing her tricks, Mommy was sleeping on the floor and couldn’t wake up. I let a monster play with my mom.”
“She tricked you, Hannah. You didn’t do anything bad. She did. It was not your fault.”
“But, can your daddy get my mom back from the ghosts? I mean… the Lonely Ones. She said they were not ghosts, but Lonely Ones.”
“Stan is a very good detective. He’s solved cases nobody ever thought he could. If anybody can get your mom back, he’s the one who can do it.”
“You promise me?”
“I can’t promise for sure. But if he can’t do it, then nobody can.”
“Thank you, Maria. I love you,” Hannah said in a tiny, strained voice.
“I love you too, Hannah. Hang in there. I’m gonna tell Stan. Then we’ll figure out these Lonely Ones you are talking about.”
Maria spent the next half hour listening to the little girl cry over the phone. She tried to comfort her whenever she was given the chance, but it was mostly just being there to listen that mattered. Maria was crying too by the time she went to the living room to tell Stan.
There’s only one person who controls your happiness. Yes, you yourself. The only one with the actual power to make you happy or keep you from being happy is you. Not me. I control only me and my happiness. Not yours. Stop thinking that. True happiness requires you to cook your own happiness recipe. So, there! Wisdom. My two cents. Although it isn’t even worth half that.
I have been thinking of the end of my personal story a lot lately. And although I know it is kind of maudlin to be telling you about it in what is supposed to be a humor blog, I do not fear death any more than I welcome it. The end of the story happens to every storyteller. More than once hopefully. But if you’ve spent your lifetime tending to your little pot filled with blooming blossoms of happiness, you’ve lived a life worth living.
My story has been a good story. I like it just the way it is. I don’t have to change anything so far.
But everything is slowing down. I can’t write or draw as much as I did only a year ago. So, the last chapter is probably here already. We shall see how it ends.
But don’t worry or be sad for me. Tend your own little pot of happiness blossoms. Make them bloom. I will be fine. And so will you.
Catch a Falling Star 