Catch a Falling Star

It has never been my intention to become a dirty old man. I understand how it happens. Age takes away a lot of inhibitions that you may have had during the more respectable years of your life. After you lose the ability to have any sexual experiences that aren’t mere memories, you might forget that it is not proper to make embarrassing remarks, rude jokes, unwelcome pinches, and random butt touches on young and desirable females. The first President Bush explored the line between dirty-old-coot behaviors and actual sexual harassment. And then died soon after. Being a coot is not sufficient excuse… but it can definitely be an unconscious cause.

She said it to me in plain English, even though that was not her first language. She said, “If you draw me naked, you draw me as a happy nude girl. Not sexy or icky. but sweet and playful and funny and fun!”

“Yes, ma’am!” I answered with a salute which made her giggle.

“I am not your ship captain. Just the beautiful person in charge.”

I have always been as careful as possible. I have never asked a female of any age to pose nude for me. Either they were a model in an art class I was taking, or they asked me as an adult to draw them, or they asked me to draw them because they liked the other nudes I had drawn and got their parents’ approval and supervision.

Or, like my imaginary granddaughter pictured above, they were not real enough for full consent to be required. (Yes, I know it is weird to be drawing nude little girls who are not real, but I am becoming a crazy old coot, doing stuff I would never have done in my younger, more respectable days.)

I don’t draw nudes for sexual reasons. I do not try to create pornography, especially not child pornography. What I am trying to create is art that shows innocence, freshness, freedom, and joy in your own bodily form. The beauty is in drawing something potentially fragile and vulnerable that is safely navigating the complexities of the clothed, repressed, and dangerous world around us.

I was robbed of the chance to be confidently naked in my own childhood. I won’t recount how that happened here, but it is one of the many sadnesses of a post-Victorian world where everyone is overly concerned about seeing nudity to the point of putting fig leaves on nude statues. Your life can be totally screwed up because people feel so repressed sometimes that they have to act out in weird and possibly illegal ways. And do things to you that you don’t want them to do.

The nudists I have known in real life are more confident, friendly, and accepting than the textile-addicted people with tighter than usual behinds who are always telling me how to behave and think.

I don’t randomly take off all my clothes in public or show off my private parts to people that aren’t also nudists and do not want to see them. Even other nudists don’t spend lots of time staring at my privates. They are not beautiful. (Not the nudists, the things I mostly keep private.)

So, I am not an exhibitionist, a sex fiend, or a pornographer. I am an artist obsessed with innocent nudity. No matter what you may think of my work, admiring it or condemning it, I am not self-conscious about making it to the best of my deteriorating ability. I enjoy drawing it. I enjoy sharing it.

The little girl voice in my head, the one commanding me in the voice of my imaginary granddaughter (a story for another day that includes the fact that I have no real grandchildren,) constantly argues with me about what I am doing. And I keep in mind that I don’t want to be offensive or too controversial. But she also asks me why people like you come to this blog and look and sometimes even read. Is your motivation clean and pure of heart? Or did questionable search terms bring you here? Think about it carefully. Nudity is not evil. I believe nudism is good for people. But it has to be embraced by people who seek it for the right reasons. Cannibals, child-molesters, and rapists are not welcome. But you are not like that, or you wouldn’t have made it this far to the boring, preachy part of the essay.

Yes I will continue to coddiwomple for a while.  On my birthday in November of 2014 after retiring in May, I decided I would do a blog post every single day for at least a year.  Now, two years and four months later, I am still posting every single day.  I think that I shall continue for a while because there are real benefits to doing so.

• It keeps my seriously old and worn-out brain active, chugging along even though it is held together with mental duct tape.
• It challenges my ability to come up with new ideas.  I admit, sometimes I set down to write a post with nothing in my head but random snippets of music and empty space.  Yet, I have managed to increasingly create bizarre and exotic thought-artifacts at an increasingly volatile pace.  Perhaps soon the ideas reach critical mass and my writing goes boom like  a series of fireworks.
• It has increased my visibility on WordPress and the reach of my writing through social media.
• It has taught me how much I hate Twitter.  People tweeting in a rage at each other makes the world a birdhouse full of angry birds.
• It has also taught me to edit carefully and quickly because my writing time is theoretically limited, as is my target word-count.
• And I have learned that some days I need to do a simple and easy post like this to give my mind-muscles a chance to rest and grow.

So I will continue to post on WordPress, putting up pusillanimous Paffoonies to treat and entertain you.  (Yes, I know that “pusillanimous” means timid.  But the root words mean “small mind”, and my mind is nothing if not small.  And I also needed a multi-syllabic p-word to make the alliteration sound funnier.)

I have now entered new territory in my daily posting streak. 748 consecutive days with at least one post, one essay, one picture paffooney, or one announcement every single day for two years and 18 days. 12 days more than the last time I reached this many.

And why do I do it? Why do writers feel the need to communicate daily with the universe in this fashion, writing junk that may one day be read and understood by someone, and definitely may not be read by anyone ever? Most of the people who visit this post will do so for the pictures, not for the prose. It is a conversation with a silent universe that has no love for me, no pity, and no malice. My writing exists for the same reasons that I do. I simply already exist. I just happen to be here.

Whatever magic I have in my words, it will never teach anybody anything if they are not seeking something and make the effort to find it by including my many nonsensical notions in their searching and putting up with the inane effort to read it.

And this is the same reason that the works of writers I know and love exist. The poems of Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Walt Whitman, and whoever really wrote the blank verse of William Shakespeare. The essays of Henry David Thoreau, Robert Fulghum, Dave Barry, and Carl Sagan. The cartoon strips of Charles Shultz, Lyn Johnston, Walt Kelly, and Al Capp. The comic books of Carl Barks, Wally Wood, Stan Lee and Jack King Kirby, and Alan Moore. All the comedy, psychological drama, fantastic characters, themes, and raw emotion that make up life as I know it.

That’s why Mickey does all of it and any of it. The real reason why.

Johann Sebastian Bach may or may not have written his organ masterpiece, Toccata and Fugue in D Minor in 1704. All we know for sure is that the combined efforts of Johannes Ringk, who saved it in manuscript form in the 1830’s, and Felix Mendelssohn who performed it and made it a hit you could dance to during the Bach Revival in 1840 made it possible to still hear its sublime music today. Okay, maybe not dance to exactly… But without the two of them, the piece might have been lost to us in obscurity.

The Toccata part is a composition that uses fast fingerings and a sprightly beat to make happy hippie type music that is really quite trippy. The Fugue part (pronounced Fyoog, not Fuggwee which I learned to my horror in grade school music class) is a part where one part of the tune echoes another part of the tune and one part becomes the other part and then reflects it all back again. I know that’s needlessly confusing, but at least I know what I mean. That is not always a given when I am writing quickly like a Toccata.

I have posted two different versions for you to listen to in this musical metaphor nonsensical posticle… err… Popsicle… err… maybe just post. One is the kinda creepy organ version like you might find in a Hammer Films monster movie in the 1970’s. The other is the light and fluffy violin version from Disney’s Fantasia. I don’t really expect you to listen to both, but listening to one or the other would at least give you a tonal hint about what the ever-loving foolishness I am writing in this post is really all about.

You see, I find sober thoughts in this 313-year-old piece of music that I apply to the arc of my life to give it meaning in musical measure.

This is the Paffooney of this piece, a picture of my wife in her cartoon panda incarnation, along with the panda persona of my number two son. The background of this Paffooney is the actual Ringk manuscript that allowed Bach’s masterwork not to be lost for all time.

My life was always a musical composition, though I never really learned piano other than to pick out favorite tunes by ear. But the Bach Toccata and Fugue begins thusly;

The Toccata begins with a single-voice flourish in the upper ranges of the keyboard, doubled at the octave. It then spirals toward the bottom, where a diminished seventh chord appears (which actually implies a dominant chord with a minor 9th against a tonic pedal), built one note at a time. This resolves into a D major chord.

I interpret that in prose thusly;

Life was bright and full of promise when I was a child… men going to the moon, me learning to draw and paint, and being smarter than the average child to the point of being hated for my smart-asserry and tortured accordingly. I was sexually assaulted by an older boy and spiraled towards the bottom where I was diminished for a time and mired in a seventh chord of depression and despair. But that resolved into a D major chord when the realization dawned that I could teach and help others to learn the music of life.

And then the Fugue begins in earnest. I set the melody and led my students to repeat and reflect it back again. Over and over, rising like a storm and skipping like a happy child through the tulips that blossom as the showers pass. Winding and unwinding in equal measure, my life progressed to a creaky old age. But the notes of regret in the conclusion are few. The reflections of happinesses gained are legion. I have lived a life I do not regret. I may not have my music saved in the same way Johann Sebastian did, but I am proud of the whole of it. And whether by organ or by violin, it will translate to the next life, and will continue to repeat. What more can a doofus who thinks teaching and drawing and telling stories are a form of music ask for from life?