It’s true. You have seen these multiple times before. They are some of my favorite drawings , paintings, and pictures.
You may not agree that these are my best work. That isn’t why I included them. These are pictures I simply like, and I could’ve added another hundred or so easily.
Lord, grant me peace
In times of great violence
Grant me wisdom
As everything around me burns in ignorance
Let the cold blues
Be tempered with warm reds
Let me juggle life’s fortunes and misfortunes alike
Red balls over blue balls
Yellow, purple, and green
Over and under
The spiraling path
I’ll keep written records
In journals with pictures
And share my discoveries
With any who’ll listen
And I’ll always keep close in my heart
The people and places and memories
That mattered and shattered
The whole color wheel
Because Shakespeare once showed us the whole color wheel
Is necessary for magic to form on the page
And though yellow is also a primary too
It’s the reds that warm life as the color of blood
And the blues let us chill as the deeper color of ice
But let there no period be
To stop the color progression
Of this warm/cold blank verse
Nor rhythm or rhyme sully
The Reds and the Blues
I tested positive for Covid 19 this morning, My highest fever was 102.3 F. But I took Ibuprofin and my fever broke, Still, I could not not write more than this.
Filed under Uncategorized
This is actually a repost of an older essay since I am ill again and fighting to think in between coughing fits. Where this says I have only been naked once at the nudist park, that is no longer true as I have revisited the same park with my AANR membership.
I do now admit to being a nudist… or naturist if you prefer. To me that means, if given a choice, I would prefer to be naked all the time. Especially in a natural setting outdoors. I have probably spent more time in the company of naked people than you have, even though I was never myself nude in a social setting until my one and only visit to the Bluebonnet Naturist Park in Alvord, Texas. I was a visitor at the clothing-optional apartment complex at Manor Road in Austin a number of times in the 1980s when my girlfriend’s sister was a resident there. They asked me to disrobe a couple of times, but, as a visitor, I exercised my option. And I corresponded with Floridian nudists by letter, email, and subscriptions to nudist publications through the 1990s.
But it is very nearly an ironic notion that I am literally a nudist. My wife is opposed to nakedness for religious reasons. Although members of my family were fine with skinny-dipping in our pool until it developed fatal foundation cracks, we no longer tolerate nudity at home, except in the shower and the bedroom behind closed doors. And being naked outdoors, though it always used to be good for my health, now is a problem with my increased susceptibility to the return of skin cancer, and the fact that my psoriasis sores, in addition to being ghastly to look at, get dry, cracked, and bloody with a chance of infection far easier than they ever used to. And I have more of them.
If I am being honest, I am not really a literal nudist anymore. I don’t get naked much at all anymore. I do correspond via Twitter with other nudists, especially other nudist authors and cartoonists. But that has its down sides too. Twitter followers who are evangelical Christians un-follow me instantly when they actually see a nudist-friendly post or comment from me. Nudists are apparently among the vast multitudes of sinners destined for Hell. And being part of the Twitter-nudist community also seems to attract unwanted attention from those who love pornography, as well as those who wish to exploit the “prurient interests” of others (which, in my humble experience, is not the interests of real nudists.)
So…
I have always found it challenging to be an actual nudist. I do the best I can, but, as I have repeatedly written in other posts about the subject, I was sexually assaulted by an older boy when I was ten. I spent years overcoming an aversion to ever being seen naked by others.
That aversion prevented me from embracing a positive body image of myself for the rest of my childhood and well into my young adulthood. I was deprived of the joys of skinny-dipping in the Iowa River and being comfortable in my own skin. That was a definite drawback when it came to showers in school after P.E. Class, or showers after football, basketball, or track practice. I was robbed of my sense of naked childhood innocence. I felt like I had a terrible secret to keep, and I was secretly a monster for having naked feelings.
So, in order to be more like a valid, real person, Mickey, as a nudist, has committed himself to being a Spiritual Nudist. A Spiritual Nudist doesn’t hide anything by wearing clothing. A Spiritual Nudist is honest, and tells the naked truth. And a Spiritual Nudist doesn’t have to be actually naked to be Spiritually nude.
I may not now fit the definition of an actual, literal nudist anymore. But I can think like a nudist, tell nudist stories, and draw naked people (in a non-pornographic way). And like a real nudist, I no longer worry about what other people think. The naked truth is still the truth. And maybe even more-so than when people wear their clothes as if it were a disguise.
Filed under autobiography, humor, irony, nudes, Paffooney
My blog on WordPress, Catch a Falling Star, now has 2,103 followers for the very first time. And I have posted 646 days in a row.
You may have noticed that my blog is about surrealist art, fantasy fiction for young adults, and a somewhat strange idea of what humor is all about.
Filed under announcement, artwork, blog posting, Paffooney
My proudest achievement of my thirty-one year years as a public school teacher was the fact that I survived my whole first year. That doesn’t sound like much to you unless you are a teacher. But it sounds even more amazing if you knew what South Texas junior high schools were like in 1981. I mean, my school, Frank Newman Junior High had practically been destroyed the year before I started teaching there by the seventh graders I would be teaching as eighth graders.
You see some of my favorites in the painting I did during my third year as a teacher. From front to back they are Dottie, Teresa, Ruben, Fabian, and Javier. Of course, in these essays about being a teacher, I usually don’t use real names to protect the privacy of my former students, both the innocent and the guilty. So, I leave it to you to decide whether, even though I love these kids, those aren’t probably their real names. Unless… they are.
But not all Texas eighth graders are loveable people. In fact, they are hard on first-year rookie teachers. Especially the ones with a Midwestern faith that they can step in and change the world with their idealistically pure and golden teaching methods. Those teachers they will try to eat alive.
I followed the seventh grade English teacher in the same classroom with the same kids. They made her scream daily, had classroom fist fights weekly, exploded firecrackers under her chair twice during the year, and made her run away to the San Antonio airport and leave teaching behind forever. As ninth graders, they made their English I teacher leave teaching forever even though she was a three-year veteran. And believe me, they tried to do the same to me.
I foiled them constantly by being an on-your-feet-all-day teacher rather than a sit-behind-the-desk-and-yell teacher like my predecessor. After I had a chance to sit during planning period, I always had to clean thumbtacks, tape, and smeared chocolate bars off the seat of my little wooden teacher chair. Paper airplanes were the least gross things that flew through the air. Boogers, spit-wads, spit-wet pieces of chalk, and brown things you had to hope were chewed chocolate flew constantly whenever you had your back turned to them. And if there was only one kid behind you and you turned on him and asked pointedly, “Who threw that?” The kid, of course, saw nothing, has no idea, you can torture him, and he still won’t know anything because you are a lousy teacher and didn’t make him learn anything.
And lessons were mostly about talking over the malevolent tongue-wigglers. They didn’t listen. Not even to each other. One kid would be talking about monster trucks that shoot fire out of their exhaust pipes while the kid next to him was talking at the same time about whether Flipper is properly called a dolphin or a porpoise, or like his older brother says, “a giant penis-fish.” And the girls behind them are actually hearing each other, but only because they are speculating which boy in the classroom has the cutest butt.
I broke up three fights by myself that year, one of which I got slugged in the back of the head by the aggressor during, teaching me to always get between them facing the aggressor and never being wrong about who the aggressor is.
They don’t let you do much teaching at all your first year. They force you to practice discipline by keeping them all seated at the same time with their books open in front of them. “I don’t do literature,” Ernie Lozano told me. Well, to be accurate, none of them actually did literature that year. But they taught me to survive long enough to learn how to actually teach them something.
On the last day of school that year we gave them all extended time on the playground, using the outdoor basketball court to keep them occupied for long enough for a terrible school year to finally run its course. They didn’t set the school on fire that year. They didn’t break into the office that year and steal all the cash. We did well enough at keeping them under control that year that I got rehired and our principal got promoted to high school principal. I had a decision to make that year. Would I keep teaching? Or find another job? Sixty percent of all first-year teachers in Texas in 1982 quit teaching. I only earned $11,000 that year. Did I really want to continue down that dark path for another school year?
Ruben walked up to stand beside me and watch the bigger eighth graders foul each other on the basketball court. “You know, Mr. Beyer, you were my favorite teacher this year.”
“Thank you, Ruben. I needed to hear that.” I bit my lip to keep from crying.
That was when I made the decision. I stuck it out in that same school and district for the next 23 years. I became the head of the Cotulla Middle School English Department. I moved to the Dallas area for family reasons in 2004, but I would teach for eight more years in two more districts and in three more schools. But all of that is Ruben’s fault. Because that was the most important thing anyone ever said to me as a teacher. And I did hear it more than once. But he was the first.
Yes, today is another in a long, tepid series of Art-Day posts, but it is also about metacognitive thinking. Specifically thinking about thinking using pictures to think with. (Maybe that title should say, “Free-Thought Thinker” rather than, “Thought-Free.”)
To start with, what does a person actually see when they close their eyes? My brain does not color everything on the inside of my eyelids black. Even in the dark of night with no nightlight so that nothing shines through my eyelids, my brain interprets the dark as shapes, patterns, and colors. Hence the inspiration for this picture.
But my brain is never satisfied with raw shapes, colors, and patterns. It has to interpret ideas into them. The mass of yellow and black resolves into a butterfly, or a sunflower, or an etude by J.S. Bach. The pink mass becomes a blond girl playing the music in my head…. a girl from piano-lesson days in the early 70’s. But naked. The way I always thought about her while sitting and waiting for my piano lesson and listening to hers. How else does a boy think about a pretty girl when he is fourteen?
And as the items in the picture take shape, they do also begin to tell a story. Who is this Dr. Seabreez? Is he a shaman of the Republic of Lakotah People? Is he a white man? Seabreez is not a Native American name. The naked boy by the tent flap has a crutch, and there is a mouse silhouetted nearby. Does that make him a medical doctor? A veterinarian? A professor of Native-American Studies? The mind begins to piece together a script.
But here we see that Dr. Seabreez has set up a new practice in Japan. Again the boy near the door has a crutch and there is a silhouetted mouse near him. But now the other boy has horns on his forehead. Why horns? And pointed ears? Is he a Doctor of Magic and Wizardry? Demonology perhaps? And what is an anthropomorphized panda doing in Japan? That’s clearly a Japanese castle in the distance. The collar Kanji is definitely Japanese in character.
And now there are horns again. Three of them by my count. And another naked character. But a Grecian background. The mind is here making connections between the pictures, noticing patterns. Appreciating colors. And turning every detail over in the mind’s eye, evaluating and analyzing.
Art, especially on Saturdays, totally engages the mind. That is one of the reasons we keep art around to look at again and again. It is the purpose of art to make us see something. And not just once, superfluously. We must see it in depth, looking beyond the surface.
I am not a leper, but parts are wearing out and falling off.
I am thinking more and more about death and dying and the end of the world often enough to become a depressing person to be around.
The only novel I seem to be able to make regular progress on is The Haunted Toy Store. And it’s full of ghosts.
My books are beginning to sell occasionally on Amazon. But my blog views, Twitter followers, and author friends willing to talk about writing have all gone downhill.
I have an overall sinking feeling, and it is getting worse.
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Catch a Falling Star 
What I am Thankful For
I am grateful for the fact that I have never killed anyone in my life so far. When I turned 18 in 1974, I signed up for the draft as was required by the law, and I received a draft number that had a high likelihood of being called up. I had to think about joining the Navy as my father did in the 1950s during the Korean Conflict. Or possibly resign myself to going to jail for refusing to be called up. I was a confirmed pacifist from early on in my life (a result of the trauma caused by being secretly a victim of a sexual assault at the age of ten.) So, I lucked out and the draft was suspended before the government would’ve decided to draft me in 1975.
I also did not ever cause the death of anyone by a traffic accident, household accident, or any other accidental way. As long as I am still driving, I have to use the caveat that I have not killed anyone yet.
I am also grateful for pessimism. I have been accused of being optimistic about many things. But I would argue it is a tactical advantage to be firmly pessimistic. I look at every possible outcome of any and all undertakings. I plan on things going wrong, including serious thought being given to how I will deal with huge roadblocks to my goals, concocting workable plans B, C, D, and even all the way to Z. Being a pessimist means you will not put all the Easter eggs in one basket, especially the basket the drunken Easter bunny plans on hiding at the bottom of the river in a bag full of stones. I am not deterred in my quests by the first, second, or third obstacle. I am willing to rent scuba equipment to deal with the drunken bunny thing. I do not get downhearted because I expected the worst to happen. And I deal with it for as long as it is possible. Persistence and preparedness are worth far more than luck and chance. And this is where I have to endure the inevitable claim that I am secretly an optimist. I confess. I do believe I can wear down and conquer anything. If that’s optimism, then I have to insist that I have renamed it the “Fruits of Pessimism.”
And I am also grateful for the chance to become a nudist, even though not until late in life because it represents a victory over the monster that abused me when I was ten. He left me with a lifelong fear of being naked in the presence of others, extreme difficulty with having a sex life, including self-harm to my private parts, a fear of becoming a homosexual or a child molester, and deep depression about all this stuff I felt I had to keep secret. My mother and father both died without knowing it happened. But my wife and children know. My sisters both know. And I was able to spend last Memorial Day weekend with nudists at the Bluebonnet Nudist Park. I am now liberated of all the things that once made me feel like a monster and made me hate myself. His ghost has no further power over me. And I am grateful.
I know I am probably the only person in the US grateful for these three things all at the same time. But I think the most important things to be grateful for in life are the things you have overcome, and the means you have for overcoming them.
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Filed under battling depression, commentary, Paffooney, philosophy