Catch a Falling Star

January 30, 2023 · 12:21 am

Why Does Mickey Want to be a Nudist? Part 2

Although I was fond of being naked outdoors before that came to an end with the assault I endured at age ten, in my youth I had my doubts about nudists. It was not a thing that happened anywhere I was aware of in Iowa. All I knew about it was the jokes they made about it in TV comedies like the sole nudist park episode of the Brian Kieth Show. And my psyche and personal body image were extremely fragile due to the trauma. I was in no way willing to risk the kind of exposure to ridicule that association with nudism would have for me.

When the twins who claimed to be nudists teased me in my classroom with details about it, I was keenly aware that there were bright red lines involved in that issue that cannot be crossed. Especially since I was a school teacher in charge of vulnerable pubescent boys and girls who obviously had their own issues in terms of nudity, sexuality, and personal body image. There was danger involved in being connected to ideas like nudism right along with communism, liberalism, and any suggestion that a teacher might be behaving toward students in an inappropriate way. I was fully aware that merely being accused of something could destroy my career, whether there was any relationship to the truth behind the accusation or not.

Drawings like this one existed in my portfolio at home while I was teaching, but only my girlfriends, my parents, and my sisters knew they existed.

My career as a school teacher was a sacred trust as far as I was concerned. My first teaching job was in a poor, rural school district in deep South Texas. I vowed that not only would I never be a threat to molest or assault a child or a teenager, but I would also actively try to prevent every child entrusted to me from being victimized in that way. It was crucial to my own belief in myself as well as my belief in the goodness of mankind that my plan would work out for the best.

There were a number of young boys, fatherless, raised by grandparents or aunts, and exposed to abusive adults, that needed a male mentor enough to show up at my door. I never let them in without the windows open and a clear view for every passerby that nothing wrong or inappropriate was going on. They came to talk, to get help with homework, to play role-playing games, or sometimes to just hang out. The County Sheriff, the Baptist Preacher, and the head of the high school Science department were all aware of what I was doing because their sons all came to participate in role-playing games, computer games, and discussions. I underwent training to become qualified as a foster parent for anyone who needed that (though it was specified by me that I couldn’t be a foster parent for girls while still being single for obvious reasons. And the city had no social workers at all in residence, so I was never called upon for actual parenting experience.) I was supported in that effort by my principal during the third year I was teaching. He saw how effective I was teaching problem-child boys. He sent a couple of troubled kids my way for mentoring.

My girlfriend in the early 80s was a teacher’s aide who worked both in my classroom and in the classrooms of the two other English teachers on campus. Ysandra was a divorcee and a much more world-wise person than I was. She had been through some trauma too. In fact, she was the first person I was able to tell about the sexual assault I had endured because she had been abused too and also endured the kind of moment where the traumatic event comes back to haunt you, complete in every horrible detail. And she and I planned dates together in the Austin area because my parents were living in Taylor, Texas, an Austin suburb, and her sister lived with a husband and child in an apartment complex in downtown Austin. That apartment complex, however, was a clothing-optional apartment complex that was destined to push nudism right up in my face once again.

That, of course, will be the completely embarrassing topic of the third part of this essay.

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Filed under artwork, education, humor, nudes, Paffooney

January 29, 2023 · 2:13 am

Evil People

I have always maintained that people are basically good. I believe we are born good. All capable of empathy, good morals, and, most importantly… Love. In order to be anything else in life, a hard-hearted criminal, a manipulator, a murderer, a corporate CEO, the 45th President of the US, you have to be taught to do evil.

So, if all people are basically good, and most of us believe in a loving, benevolent God, why are we on a downward spiral of climate change grinding out the eventual extinction of all life on Earth?

You have to be taught to be evil. But there is more to it than simply having a father and a grandfather who were deeply involved with the KKK. You can be taught evil things by circumstances you simply can’t control due to their complexity and unsolvable problematic nature. Being raised in poverty is a big one. Being raised in poverty and having your fears and disappointments massaged and amplified by the propaganda on FOX News is an even bigger one. Intolerance, bigotry, and, most of all, hatred are a very human reaction to personal suffering, and they become an evil thing if you don’t properly place the blame on the real causes of things and then solve those problem-perpetuating causes.

Greed and narcissism are real causes of many evils that largely go un-dealt-with. In our modern world unregulated capitalism means the worst offenders have an automatic incentive to choose increasing profits over the well-being of the general population. Paying carbon taxes and taking carbon out of manufacturing emissions don’t help profits as much as being able to simply pour the waste into the air we breathe and the water we are literally made of. The temptation is simply too great to those raised on excessive wealth and privileges. In fact, it can be too much for those who built their own fortunes without being evil too. Staying good is not always a choice that wealth allows. Few are altruistic enough to give away an entire fortune once they have it in their hands. Whether they see how it affects them or not.

I can see these things are true, but I also have no power, no magic wand to wave, to solve these miserable problems. Evil is a feature of being human. And only our collective will can solve it. We are not inherently evil, deserving of every bad thing that’s coming to us. But even the worst villains think of themselves as the heroes of their own story. So, how do we solve it all? You tell me. And then we’ll solve it together.

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Filed under angry rant, philosophy

January 28, 2023 · 4:50 am

Living in the World I Once Drew

It is normal for the world we live in to inspire us to draw pictures of it. But architects do the opposite. They imagine a world we could live in, and then build it.

Sometimes, like in the picture above, I draw real people in imaginary places. Other times I draw imaginary people and put them in real places.

Gyro and Billy on the planet Pan Galactica A

Sometimes I put imaginary people in imaginary places. (I photo-shopped this planet myself.)

In fiction, I am re-casting my real past as something fictional, so the places I draw with words in descriptions need to be as real as my amber-colored memory can manage.

Valerie and her skateboard in front of the Congregational Church

When I use photos, though, I have to deal with the fact that over time, places change. The church does not look exactly like it did in the 1980s when this drawing is set.

Drawing things I once saw, and by “drawing” I mean “making pictures,” is how I recreate myself to give my own life meaning.

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Filed under artwork, autobiography, collage, commentary, humor, illustrations, imagination, Paffooney, photo paffoonies

Tagged as Saturday Art Day

January 27, 2023 · 3:43 am

Why Does Mickey Want to be a Nudist?

I told you about being the kind of child that liked to run around naked in places where nobody else would see. And I only got caught a couple of times.

And I also told you about how I was cured of that behavior by being sexually assaulted by a cruel sadist. If you weren’t listening in your head when you read that part, then don’t worry about backing up. You don’t have to revisit that terrible thing to appreciate how this story goes.

But just because I had been traumatized and scarred by life, it didn’t mean God would let me simply hide from the problem. I was born to be a nudist, and God’s special sense of humor laden with karma and irony wasn’t about to let me hide from that.

The first thing I had to deal with as a young man hiding from nakedness and nudity was having a job at a daycare center for children of students and staff at the University of Iowa as a work-study job while I was working on my Master’s degree. It was a janatorial job, but it also involved childcare of kids who were all no older than four, and most of them still in pampers and pull-ups. And the female work-study employee was slightly squeamish about changing diapers. So, even though I was entirely reluctant to touch the kids for phobic reasons, I learned to effectively change diapers and messed training pants. I discovered that way that two of girls, Dylan and Sierra, were actually long-haired boys. And I also learned that when we broke out the swimming pool for summer afternoons, the hippy-dippy parents prefered skinny-dipping to having to bring and keep up with swimsuits. So, I found myself supervising half a dozen to eight little nudists in the back yard of the daycare house. I learned to my great relief that I didn’t have any sort of sexual attraction at all for naked kids. It was something I had worried about because of my studies about how victims of molestation often became molesters. And naked kids you have clean even if they do poop in the potty are entirely too icky to even get a flash of that kind of evil notion. I was terrified of naked people, even myself, but I became comfortable around naked little monkeyshines. Male or female, no difference.

………………………Once I became a teacher, especially an inexperienced gringo teacher in a school of mostly Spanish-speaking middle school students, I had to learn to deal with young ladies who have an aggressive, hormone-fueled sense of humor. Especially a pair of twin girls, cheerleader types, who discovered the one topic that made me blush and double-clutch while talking.

They routinely told me stories about them going to the nude beach on South Padre Island over on the coast of Texas. They made their group of girlfriends laugh hilariously. So, suspecting they were lying just to embarrass me, I asked for more details and kept them talking, hoping to catch them in a lie. They told me about going to the beach and getting naked, using a towel to sit naked on the sand, and loving to feel the water on their naked skin. One of them, when I thought I had caught them in a lie, offered to get naked in the classroom to prove they liked being nudists. That had to be a hard no! And they started telling me about the nudist park near San Antonio, a place called Riverside in the 1980s, the time when they were actually in my English class. I later looked that place up in an SA phone book, and discovered it was real.

At one point during their Eighth-Grade year, they even invited me to go with their family to the nudist park for the weekend. I immediately turned them down. They made fun of me for being afraid of nudists, which, ironically, I was. And to this day, I don’t know for sure whether they were real nudists or just having fun at my expense with an elaborate lie. I never dared to ask their parents about it, though that would’ve been karma for them no matter what the truth was.

Now, so far in this post, I have only told you the early part of how I learned about nudism, and there is obviously more to go. So, there will be a part two, at least here in the blog if not in the book.

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Filed under feeling sorry for myself, humor, kids, nudes

January 27, 2023 · 2:05 am

Magic Flowers

There are magical flowers in Mrs. Pennywhistle’s garden.

And what do I mean by that?

She grows snapdragons, pansies, and nasturtiums like any good granny-gardener would.

But amongst the children of our little town, the rumor is that she’s actually a witch.

A good witch.

Not a bad witch.

Her spells only fascinate, never glammer, never take over your little-boy or little-girl mind.

This is the magical blossom she got from old Dr. Mirabilis. He’s a wizard from Peru that she found in the nursing home in Belle City. He gave it to her as a gift when his arthritic hands could no longer keep it alive on the hospital window sill. She cares for it like it was her own baby.

It’s magical power is as an aid to contemplation. It’s gentle purplish-pink color is calming when you stare at it. Its odor is mesmerizing. She uses it to talk to the doctor now that he is gone, and she can no longer visit him to talk about her flower garden.

These pretty posies are planted all around the edges of the garden.

Especially around the carrots and cabbage.

Do not stick your little noses between the pink and white petals.

They have an awful smell.

But their magic is keeping the rabbits out.

Especially from the cabbages and carrots.

And the pansies are the clowns and punchinellos of the flower bed.

See their angry eyes under bushy-black eyebrows? And their too-serious little broomlike moustaches?

How can you do anything but laugh?

And the White Rose…

That’s the avatar of Mrs. Pennywhistle herself.

When she can no longer keep that one growing, it means the gardener has gone.

And the garden will soon be gone for good as well.

And then where will the children go?

For magic flowers?

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Filed under flowers, foolishness, humor, Paffooney, pen and ink paffoonies, poetry, strange and wonderful ideas about life

January 26, 2023 · 3:47 am

Word Magic

From the time I could first remember, I was always surrounded by stories. I had significantly gifted story-tellers in my life. My Grandpa Aldrich (Mom’s Dad) could spin a yarn about Dolly O’Rourke and her husband, Shorty the Dwarf, that would leave everybody in stitches. (Metaphorical, not Literal)

And my Grandma Beyer (Dad’s Mom) taught me about family history. She told me the story of how my Great Uncle, her brother, died in a Navy training accident during World War II. He was in gun turret aboard a destroyer when something went wrong, killing three in the explosion.

Words have power. They can connect you to people who died before you were ever born. They have the power to make you laugh, or make you cry.

Are you reading my words now? After you have read them, they will be “read.” Take away the “a” and they will change color. They will be “red.” Did you see that trick coming? Especially since I telegraphed it with the colored picture that, if you are a normal reader, you read the “red” right before I connected it to “reading.”

Comedy, the writing of things that can be (can bee, can dee, candee, candy) funny, is a magical sort of word wrangling that is neither fattening nor a threat to diabetes if you consume it. How many word tricks are in the previous sentence? I count 8. But that wholly depends on which “previous sentence” I meant. I didn’t say, “the sentence previous to this one.” There were thirteen sentences previous to that one (including the one in the picture) and “previous” simply means “coming before.” Of course, if it doesn’t simply mean that, remember, lying is also a word trick.

Here’s a magic word I created myself. It was a made-up word. But do a Google picture search on that word and see if you can avoid artwork by Mickey. And you should always pay attention to the small print.

So, now you see how it is. Words have magic. Real magic. If you know how to use them. And it is not always a matter of morphological prestidigitation like this post is full of. It can be the ordinary magic of a good sentence, or a well-crafted paragraph. But it is a wizardry because it takes practice, and reading, and more practice, and arcane theories spoken in the backs of old book shops, and more practice. But anyone can do it. At least… anyone literate. Because the magic doesn’t exist without a reader. So, thank you for being gullible enough for me to enchant you today.

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Filed under humor, Paffooney, strange and wonderful ideas about life, wizards, word games, wordplay, writing, writing humor, writing teacher

January 26, 2023 · 3:33 am

Making Paper Dolls

Yes, among my most disturbing artistical habits is my obsession with handcrafting paper dolls out of images that were not meant to be paper dolls. And if you look carefully you can see at least three that look like they were taken from one of those cardboard books of antique paper dolls that you used to be able to buy from Dover Press. But, in truth, I took those three (Actually four, but one got knocked on the floor and stepped on in the night) from a digital ad online, blew them up, modified the images with colored pencil and scissors, and then used both the scanner and my printer to turn them into paper dolls put together with scissors, cardboard, and glue.

There are also three in the back row, Annette with mouse ears, the boy on the bicycle, and the fairy-faun thing, which I made with my own original drawings. There’s also cowgirl Annette made from scans from a vintage Cheerios box and a little anthropomorphic puppy-boy thing that was made from a scrapbook piece that my mother cut out of one of my beginning reader books from the 1950s.

These three that were in front in the previous picture were images stolen from a fellow artist on Instagram whose name forgetful me lost in the creation of the paper dolls. I swear I meant to give her proper credit, and I will add her to the comments here when I can find her again on Instagram or Twitter. In the meantime, I contend I am not violating her copyright because I make no money from my blog, and the art project they are a part of will never be sold. When I die, my wife will either give them away or destroy them. She doesn’t tend to value my artwork. The paper dolls especially. The nudist ones especially specially.

I admit that the paper doll thing is only a part of my greater doll-collecting mania. They have taken over the upstairs of the house. And that is a large part of why my wife hates them, although she enjoyed about a decade’s worth of collecting Barbie dolls before our daughter was old enough to dismember and eat so many of them.

But I also have plans to make more. Truly evil plans.

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Filed under artwork, doll collecting, humor, photo paffoonies

January 25, 2023 · 12:31 am

Taking to the Air (Saturday Art Post)

Yes, this is in the air. See? No space suits.

If we cannot fly, at least our spirits do

Travel by bubble-blowing, gum-chewing goldfish.

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Filed under artwork, goofy thoughts, humor, Paffooney

Tagged as Saturday Art Day

January 25, 2023 · 12:17 am

So… What?

Thanks for the idea, Norm.

I really didn’t know what I was going to write about in this post. I have been tired all day, not able to get any sleep after what happened last night a 3:55 a.m.

So… What happened?

The monkey sitting at the random screwy events typewriter decided to write about late-night driving done by tired women.

I was awakened by a loud smash. Followed by the sound of metal and plastic in a trash compactor accompanied by a screeching sound that obviously had to be producing sparks. Sorta like a car rolling over. Then a car alarm sounded like someone was breaking into a car.

I was smart enough to put my shoes on. It was a cold night, so I had my red pajamas on rather than being naked. I grabbed my phone to go look and stumbled downstairs, bleary-eyed and ready to find a crashed airplane on our side lawn.

But it wasn’t an airplane. I dreamed about that part. It was a compact car with a caved-in front fender and crushed parts that suggested it had rolled completely over and come to rest on its wheels again.

Once the alarm had gone off, the car had gone completely dark. I looked for smoke… none. I looked for movement on the driver’s side, and there was none.

I was certain it was a very bad outcome. I was completely awake by that time, and I knew the most helpful thing I could do was call 911. The neighbor to the south appeared, and he went to check on the driver as he heard me talking to the 911 operator.

There were three police cars in about two minutes, and an ambulance came seconds afterward.

The lady who had been driving woke up and opened her car door before the police arrived. And she seemed fine. She told the neighbor that she had fallen asleep at the wheel. She had glanced off the side of the huge live oak on the corner by our house, tearing off a chunk of bark. She wasn’t sure her car had rolled over, but she thought it had. She seemed okay. Maybe being asleep and relaxed had made her rubbery enough to not get badly hurt. She had been wearing a seatbelt with a shoulder harness, and it helped save her life.

The police and ambulance took over then. I went back to bed to obsess about what happened for what was left of my night.