I had originally thought to call this post “A Walk with God.” But that would probably offend my Christian friends and alienate my Jehovah’s Witness wife. It would bother my intellectual atheist friends too. Because they know I claim to be a Christian Existentialist, in other words, “an atheist who believes in God.” Agnostics are agnostics because they literally know they don’t know what is true and what is merely made up by men. And not knowing offends most people in the Western world.
But Debussy’s Reverie is a quiet walk in the sacred woods, the forest of as-yet-uncovered truths.
And that is what I need today. A quiet walk in the woods… when no literal woods are available.
This pandemic has been hard on me. I am a prisoner in my room at home most days. My soul is in darkness, knowing that the end could be right around the corner. I am susceptible to the disease. It didn’t slay me on its first visit to the house, but that doesn’t mean it can’t get me on the second or third visit. Health experts are expecting a resurgence of up to 3,000 deaths per day before the end of the year. If I am relying on luck to avoid it, luck will run out.
I am not afraid to die. I have no regrets. But I have been in a reverie about what has been in the past, what might have been, and what yet may be… if only I am granted the time.
And, as always, I feel like I have writing yet to do. I am about to finish The Wizard in his Keep. And I have stories beyond that to complete if I may.
But the most important thing right now is having time to think. Time for Reverie. And reflections upon the great symphony of life as it continues to play on… with or without me.
Some of the drawings and paintings I do, I do because they make me happy. I know it’s more noble if I do it to make you, the viewer, happy. But part of making art is that you are making it for your own needs. Art is therapy. Often, art is love. This picture of Shannon (not her real name) makes me happy. She was a student I loved, (only in the legal, Platonic sense.)
This one makes me happy. I drew it on a day I needed to laugh. And I laugh a little even now when I look at it.
This one is also a smirkable smirk-maker.
I drew this on a day when I was lonely.
This one tickles me on many levels.
These Telleron, temporary Martians helped me start my publishing career with the publication of Catch a Falling Star.
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And pretty girls can make me happy too.
Especially naked ones.
And I mean drawing them, not what was in your evil mind.
One should never be snarky. All you can accomplish by being snarky is making Snark Smallberg mad. He doesn’t want to be called “Snarky” anymore. And we should respect him since he is a movie star and makes millions of dollars by making terrible movies. Don’t you get why he deserves respect? Did you not read the words, “Millions of dollars?”
‘ Of course, I understand snark really well. I was a middle-school English teacher for many years. The answer to most teacher questions asked directly to students is made up of 50% teacher-pleasing and 50% needing to be translated from teen-speaking Snarkese. You have to understand that half the time the answer means the opposite of what is being said.
“You are such a good teacher, Mr. B, and you teach us really useful stuff. That’s why we throw spitballs at you when your back is turned, because we love and respect you so much.”
And I would see that same level of love and respect in my paycheck each month.
And of course, we are coming out of a golden age of good government right now. Under the greatest president we ever had (by his own testimony) we were treated to a healthy time of nothing but helpful tax cuts to the fortunes of the golden job-creators who continue to generously agree we can keep living this wonderful life if we just work hard enough. Pulling ourselves up by our boot straps because gravity doesn’t exist if you are rich. The problem of climate changed, though not real in any way, is solved by removing regulations from industries who want to enhance our waterways with chemical waste. And any crime committed by those in public office is to be forgiven because it is so good for the economy. And we should stop all witch-hunts because we have already caught too many witches, and we are not finding enough of them on the Democratic side.
Daffy is definitely angry because things are going so well, and we just aren’t appreciating it enough.
And why am I sparking with so many snarky sparks in today’s hitching post for horses of a different color? Well, my two sisters, my brother, and I recently inherited a 150-year-old family farm. In our parents’ will, nothing could be done to the property, including selling any part of it, without the agreement of all four of us. But little brother, by the unique privilege of being the youngest and most spoiled of us, has decided to contest the will. One out of four of us is aparently going to use legal means to split up and sell off a family legacy. Life is so wonderfully fair. God bless his Republican abilities to be generous, kind, and thoughtful… but before I can snark any further, I am getting a phone call. Caller ID says it is “Spam Risk.” That’s a Russian name, isn’t it? I am sure it will be an important phone call.
Let me begin by reminding you that the only head I have to explore as an example of what I am talking about in this essay is my own stupid head.
So, this is not an insult post. This is self-deprecating humor. And therefore, the contents of your own stupid head are completely safe.
Now, there is considerable evidence in the books already that Mickey is not, and has not been, particularly stupid for a large portion of his time on earth. He got college scholarships based on his ACT and SAT scores to get his undergraduate degree for free (in the 1970’s when it was significantly cheaper than now). And he has been both a teacher in a gifted program and the middle-school coordinator of that same gifted program. So, Mickey has effectively fooled everybody into thinking he is not stupid. But consider for a moment where the laughs come from when watching Stephen Urkel on TV, or the four nerds from Big Bang Theory. Smart people do stupid things and are very awkward at times, proving that, no matter how smart they are, smart people are capable of being quite stupid.
What, then, is the stupid thinking in Mickey’s stupid head?
Well, there are a number of things. Mickey is, as you may know if you read any of his nudity blogs, obsessed with nakedness. He was assaulted as a child in a way that caused him to be afraid of nudity and slow-developing in sexuality. As he grew older, he had to compensate for this lack of natural development. So, he has reached an age where his brain stupidly rejects guard-rails when talking about nudity and sex. He has convinced himself that he wants to be a nudist, and writes about nudity constantly, as evidenced by this very paragraph. When Mark Twain was in his seventies, he did leave the house without remembering to wear clothes more than once. The neighbors did not compliment him for doing that. That and worse is probably in Mickey’s near future.
And sex, as a subject sloshing around in a brain awash with hormones and other nightmare chemical imbalances, leads to a rash of stupid decisions. Of course, Mickey is old and has had chronic prostatitis long enough to eliminate the possibility of making a stupid decision about infidelity since those body parts don’t actually work anymore, but it leads to buying numerous things sold by marketers using sex as a way to sell things. Cabinets full of hair gel and cologne and Herbalife products that can never be used up is the result. And the wife is frustrated with the foods Mickey is constantly addicted to. “Why so much chips and salsa, Mickey?” Chips and salsa? Hubba hubba!
And Mickey’s old brain, full of a vast quantity of useless trivia-type knowledge, random wisdom floating around in a disconnected fashion, and prejudices formed by a bizarre obsession with things like nudism, Disney movies, comic books, model trains, and doll-collecting, becomes strangely creative. He begins to believe weird things.
For example, he thinks rabbits, if they were suddenly transformed into people, would make better people than people ever do. They are mostly quiet most of the time. They eat an all-vegetable, healthy diet. And they don’t vote Republican.
He obsessively also thinks about how his mind is working and how thinking about thinking is likely to improve thinking. He even realizes that the map of his head, provided above, doesn’t accurately reflect the many branching corridors and dead-end hallways of his actually-complicated-yet-stupid mind. He thinks that thinking too much about thinking makes you stupid.
I have illustrated this entire piece without uploading any new art… What a stupid thing is that?
And finally, Mickey is left with a sense of wonder about how it is entirely possible that everybody is stupid at least part of the time. And he wonders what possible things that you, dear reader, are thinking about that you consider at least somewhat stupid? You are welcome to tell him in the comments. But remember, this post is about stupid thoughts in Mickey’s head. You are perfectly free not to worry about your own stupidity.
Some books come along telling a story that has to be taken seriously in ways that don’t make sense in any normal way. The Alchemist is one of those books.
What is an alchemist, after all?
An alchemist uses the medieval forms of the art of chemistry to transmute things, one thing becoming another thing.
Coelho in this book is himself an alchemist of ideas. He uses this book to transmute one idea into another until he digs deep enough into the pile of ideas to finally transmute words into wisdom.
There is a great deal of wisdom in this book, and I can actually share some of it here without spoiling the story.
Here are a few gemstones of wisdom from the Alchemist’s treasure chest;
“It’s the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting…” (p.13)
“It’s the simple things in life that are the most extraordinary; only wise men are able to understand them.” (p.17)
“All things are one. And, when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.” (p.24)
“And when he had gone only a short distance, he realized that, while they were erecting the stall, one of them had spoken Arabic and the other Spanish. And they had understood each other perfectly well. There must be a language that doesn’t depend on words, the boy thought.” (p.45)
All of these quotes from the book, as you can see, come from the first third of the book. There are many more treasures to be found in this book. I should not share them with you here. Just as the main character of the story learns, you have to do the work for yourself. But this book is not only an enjoyable read, but a map for how you can execute your own journey towards your “Personal Legend”. In fact, you may find that the book tells you not only how to go about making a dream come true, but, if you are already on that journey successfully, it tells you what things you are already doing right.
I have probably lost a lot of followers on both Twitter and WordPress by associating myself with the idea of being a nudist. A couple of my novels that have nudist characters in them or scenes where characters have no clothes on have received some hostile blow-back. I have gotten bad reviews on books that otherwise receive excellent reviews. Of course, this is because any suggestion of nudity or sensuality is perceived as pornography, especially when my best books involve young teen characters.
The general opinion seems to be that nudity is evil. “If God wanted us to be naked, He wouldn’t have had us born with a full suit of clothes on,” they say. Nudity equals sex. Because Queen Victoria said so.
The general opinion is not my opinion. But to avoid being censured or fired as a public school teacher, I had to hide the fact that I have been struggling all my life with a desire to live without clothes on. And now that I am retired, due to poor health, I keep running into roadblocks to actually practice being a nudist. I can really only freely be that in fiction stories.
Being a victim of a sexual assault when I was a ten-year-old boy helps me to understand female book reviewers who are hyper-sensitive to any suggestion that children and sex are being linked together. I spent years being traumatized in PE locker rooms when boys who were larger than me saw me in the showers. And trying to get out of taking the showers had consequences that included having to tell someone why I couldn’t stand the idea. And the only way I could do that would’ve been by lying. I dared not tell the truth. My father died in 2020 and my mother died last month. And neither of them knew what happened to me in a neighborhood back yard in 1966. I never found a way to tell them, and they didn’t ever read this blog. I console myself in th knowledge that, not knowing anything about it meant they enjoyed happier lives. It was not something that anyone could’ve done anything about after the fact. My attacker was dead before I ever talked about it openly.
But my journey towards being a nudist was in many ways critical to healing the mental scars of that old trauma. I used to shudder at the idea of taking my clothes off when I visited the clothing-optional apartment complex on Manor Road in Austin, Texas. My girlfriend’s sister lived there with her husband and child. I sat around a living room full of naked people with my clothes on, learning to accept them for the way they were. And they had no problem accepting me, even though I was using the clothing option. I learned that nudists are more open and honest about everything. And the place was no beauty contest. You were presented with many different variations of human anatomy. And I didn’t go blind or become a sex fiend.
The pictures in this post, nude males all, do not represent any sort of latent homosexuality in me. In fact, I am completely heterosexual with a wife and three kids. I have had gay friends and students of both persuasions. And I have no problems with them at all. These pictures are not about any kind of sexual experience. Instead they represent my own personal quest to have a healthy and positive body-image of myself in my own stupid head. I had to teach myself over time that I was not a naked prey animal, doomed to be preyed upon by those who are stronger and more predatory. These images are meant to show that I am normal, and not hideous inside my own head. They show me for the child that I wished I could’ve been. Naked, yet unafraid.
And all of this primal-scream therapy that I am finally admitting to has become a major theme in my work, writing comic adventures in young-adult novels.
Writing about these things in some of my books led to becoming a part of a community of writers who are also nudists and write fiction centered around nudist characters. I was invited to take part in a story-writing project by Ted Bun and Will Forest. This book of holiday stories will be coming out in November.
So, even if it loses me readers and gets my artwork gawked at by perverts on the internet, I will continue to take nudism to be a very good and healthy thing. I will continue to try to be a nudist for whatever time I can in the time I have left. Being nude is natural… just the way I was born into this world.
I came to an awareness of Bouguereau in the San Antonio museum of art. In the 1990’s they had one of Bouguereau’s most famous works on display upstairs in an alcove at the head of the stairway. I walked up the stairs and this painting, called Admiration hit me right between the eyes.
Admiration 1897
He was a master of figure painting in the late 1800’s. He worked in oils from live models, and may-or-may-not have used optical mirrors to transfer images onto canvas, although that sort of cheating does not account for his mastery of color, shape, composition, and form. In my humble opinion, having tried to do what he has done, he is as great a painter as Van Gogh, Rembrandt, Michelangelo, and Donatello. His figures are alive. Their skin looks absolutely real. Even the facial expressions suggest that the character is about to speak.
Of course, he creates nudes at a level that might get him labelled a pornographer. In fact, you have to realize that he comes from a time when salon painters were the only creators of erotic art, using biblical or mythological themes to cover the fact that they were creating nude female figures (and sometimes male nudes) to appeal to the automatic sensual response common to all living humans (well, most humans… I can’t speak to how prudery and religion can kill desire). Other painters of his day were definitely little more than the equivalent of Playboy Magazine. Still, he was able to produce images both nude and clothed that appear ready to step off the canvas and talk to you.
He lost a lot of his popularity at the beginning of the 20th Century because Renoir, Monet, and the Impressionists actively criticized his worked and divorced the perceptions of good art from the pursuit of realism. The invention of photography also took away some of the need for photo-realistic art. Still, in my studies of this particular painter, I believe I have discovered one of the greatest masters of oil of all time.
The alarm roared through the castle Cair Tellos on the feet of Sylph boys just like Mickey and me… except that they carried bull horns used by town criers to amplify their shouts, none of them were wererats, and over half of them were nude.
The Master ordered us to carry the boom-n-banger on it’s launch stick up to the middle parapet of the upper keep. Once there, we were to fix it for possible launch to one of the ironwood merlons and attempt to aim it at the skeleton even though the powder-loaded thing was as big as me and bigger than Mickey.
“Eli! You do not have permission to light that thing in my castle!” shouted Pippen, the castle’s wizard and high protector. He was a large Sylph with a booming voice and flowing blond hair. His robes were richly colored blue, and he wore the golden necklace of Merlini the Gray to show off his basic right to rule.
“How are you going to keep the bone-thingy from smashing us all up, then?” retorted Master Eli.
“My scouts have told me that the boy with the shottygun has been summoned by two of the slow-one boys.”
“And you’re going to rely on the same kind of lucky shot that Murphy hobbledehoy got off at that last bone-thingy?
“It worked before, didn’t it?”
“Well, what’re the odds that luck can save our bacon more than once in a blue moon?”
“I don’t have your faith in stolen slow-one magics. That thing could just as easily explode the castle wall as it would the attacker.”
“Maybe you’re right. Perhaps I use my sorcery to summon Golden Dragonfire?”
“You’ve got to be kidding! Captain Bobkin’s headquarters are still smoldering from the last time you used that.”
At that moment, the two “hobbledehoys” that Master Pippin had mentioned showed up with the third one, the bigger one (hobbledehoy, as I understand it, means a tall, skinny and totally awkward slow-one youth) with the so-called shottygun in his hands, following behind while trying desperately to pull his pants on with one hand.
“Couldn’t this have waited until I was finished in the bathroom, Mike?” shouted the biggest one,
“It’s a walking skeleton, Danny! Right out of a horror movie,” shouted one of the other hobbledehoys.
At that moment, the bone walker passed through the castle’s glammer shield meaning it would be totally hidden from the slow ones by Fey magic.
“I don’t see anything!” growled the one trying to pull his pants on while hopping on one leg, pulling on the pants with one hand, and trying to aim the shottygun with the other hand.
“It was right there a second ago!”
“You shoulda let me kill it with a baseball bat, Bobby!” swore the other smaller hobbledehoy.
Suddenly, “BLAM!” the shottygun went off, shredding the unoccupied leg of the hopping hobbledehoy’s pants.
“Dammit!”
Mickey grinned at me. “He must be too stupid to remember to wear pants too.”
“Of course,” I said.
Meanwhile the skeleton reached up with one boney hand and totally smashed that hand against the ironwood walls of the lower parapet.
Up in the hornet’s nest, Captain Bobkin ordered an attack by the wasp-riders as the three hobbledehoys hopped back towards their own distant domicile.
“What did Master Eli mean when he called those things hobbledehoys?” Mickey asked me.
“It’s a slow-one word, in English, I think, that means what you and I would be if we were as big as slow ones.”
“A foofy git that blows up his own pants when trying to put them on?”
“Exactly.”
The skeleton brought his bone fist down on the parapet again, but this time the bones splintered and the fist turned to dust.
“Aim the boom-n-banger at the skeleton’s nearest eye socket, Bob,” commanded Master Eli.
“Even though Master Pippen told us not to?”
“Of course. He just doesn’t understand slow-one magic like I do. I’m gonna light that sucker up.”
Mickey and I turned the powder-filled thing until I could sight a strait line along the top of the tube all the way to the right eye socket of the skull. Eli then snapped his fingers and a spark set the fuse ablaze.
When the thing took off with a fizzing sound instead of a boom, I was disappointed. But it hit the skull, removing the head from the rest of the skeleton and flying it off into the bean field.
Once the skull was gone, the evil magic dispersed, and the rest of the skeleton fell apart at the roots of the willow tree that formed the base of Cair Tellos.
Master Pippin looked Master Eli in the eye.
“Well, you disobeyed me again… but it worked. It is now your responsibility to go find the skull and kill the evil thing that was controlling the bone walker.”
Master Eli’s smile instantly faded. “By your will, Master Pippen.”
Ah, the little red bird that does not fly away when the winter comes. It sticks around to weather the snow and cold. Perseverance is a cardinal virtue. So, is remaining a cardinals’ fan over a lifetime. These football heroes were not my first cardinal team. The baseball cardinals of the 1960’s were. I am being honest here because honesty is also a cardinal virtue.
They were the champions of the NFL before I was born, as proven by this championship ring from 1947. Winning is not a cardinal virtue, but working hard enough to be the champion reveals that consistency and a good work ethic are.
They had heroes that made the Football Hall of Fame, and they were generally not racist because Ollie Matson was breaking the color barrier at around the same time as Jackie Robinson in baseball.
I’d like to say that I learned not to be a racist from rooting for the Cardinals, but I never saw the Chicago Redbirds on TV, or knew anything about them until I was arguing with Minnesota Vikings fans about the merits of rooting for a team that never wins. I did research. I won the argument when the Vikings lost their first Superbowl to the Kansas City Chiefs. The first of many lost Vikings’ Superbowls/
The search for truth, undertaken with upright motivations is also a cardinal virtue.
The Cardinals were in St. Louis in the 1970’s for what I look at as the “Glory Years.” They had great players like Larry Wilson, Hall-of-Fame Safety, Quarterback Jim Hart, Running Back Otis Anderson, Tight End Jackie Smith, Reciever Mel Gray, and Halfback Terry Metcalf. Don Coryell and Bud Wilkerson were the coaches that took them into the playoffs where they never quite won it all. But there were some very intense games in those playoffs where they both won and lost by inches.
In those “Cardiac Cardinals’ games” I learned to never give up. One time Mel Gray came through in the final minutes, catching the ball at the goal line as time expired… but fumbling… but-but not before, the replay official determined twenty minutes later, crossing the goal line and winning the game.
Wow!
Sometimes the thrill of the hunt supersedes the final outcome.
And, of course, it is a cardinal virtue to never say die.
Now, the Cardinals, located in Arizona, are at it again. They have a new potential MVP in Quarterback Kyler Murray. And yesterday they extended their unbeaten streak to six games. They are currently the only undefeated team in the NFL. I have high hopes again. High apple pie in the sky hopes. And I may learn another virtue or two.
So, by what right do I make any assumptions about what God actually wants? I am, after all, arguably an atheist, definitely agnostic, and probably just as stupid as anyone else you could possibly name about the subject of God and His plan… except for Kenneth Copeland and Pat Robertson and every other religious-con-man-snake-oil merchant. Oh, and Tucker Carlson who knows pretty well what Satan wants, but not God… if there is one.
But I can see the hand of God in world events of late as clearly as anyone you can name. No exceptions there.
With the recent quadruple-spiked pandemic, the resulting recession, the insurrection by the criminal former president, and our headlong rush into climate-change apocalypse, any idiot can tell that God is itching to do some serious smiting. Yes, smiting, that unhappy word for getting smashed to death by Thor’s Hammer.
Tucker Carlson has been revealing what somebody with pretty big wings wants to happen nightly on his Fox News Spews broadcasts. He wants almost all of the money in the world to go to Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and all those closest billionaires who want to overtake Bezos or Musk. The God Tucker serves wants the rich to get richer, and everyone else to die or become totally subserviant to the rich.
And the government Tucker’s God has put in place are actively carrying out that God’s commands as Stephen Fry explains.
The zealots who swarm from Trump rally to Trump rally continue to insist that Trump is God’s choice to be their leader, and they must take election results, success, and even life away from Democrats, liberals, socialists, and anybody else who thinks Biden is actually president.-And if their agenda makes climate change accelerate, or causes nuclear war with China, then it will turn out the way they want. They will be in paradise with their God while the rest of us communist-heathens and liberals will burn in Hell for trying to help poor people and wanting to take tax cuts and guns away from the chosen people.
So, I don’t actually know what God wants in these crazy times. But there are people who insist that they do. And it is messy and painful. And I sincerely hope they are wrong.
Catch a Falling Star 
What Stupid People Think About
Let me begin by reminding you that the only head I have to explore as an example of what I am talking about in this essay is my own stupid head.
So, this is not an insult post. This is self-deprecating humor. And therefore, the contents of your own stupid head are completely safe.
Now, there is considerable evidence in the books already that Mickey is not, and has not been, particularly stupid for a large portion of his time on earth. He got college scholarships based on his ACT and SAT scores to get his undergraduate degree for free (in the 1970’s when it was significantly cheaper than now). And he has been both a teacher in a gifted program and the middle-school coordinator of that same gifted program. So, Mickey has effectively fooled everybody into thinking he is not stupid. But consider for a moment where the laughs come from when watching Stephen Urkel on TV, or the four nerds from Big Bang Theory. Smart people do stupid things and are very awkward at times, proving that, no matter how smart they are, smart people are capable of being quite stupid.
What, then, is the stupid thinking in Mickey’s stupid head?
Well, there are a number of things. Mickey is, as you may know if you read any of his nudity blogs, obsessed with nakedness. He was assaulted as a child in a way that caused him to be afraid of nudity and slow-developing in sexuality. As he grew older, he had to compensate for this lack of natural development. So, he has reached an age where his brain stupidly rejects guard-rails when talking about nudity and sex. He has convinced himself that he wants to be a nudist, and writes about nudity constantly, as evidenced by this very paragraph. When Mark Twain was in his seventies, he did leave the house without remembering to wear clothes more than once. The neighbors did not compliment him for doing that. That and worse is probably in Mickey’s near future.
And sex, as a subject sloshing around in a brain awash with hormones and other nightmare chemical imbalances, leads to a rash of stupid decisions. Of course, Mickey is old and has had chronic prostatitis long enough to eliminate the possibility of making a stupid decision about infidelity since those body parts don’t actually work anymore, but it leads to buying numerous things sold by marketers using sex as a way to sell things. Cabinets full of hair gel and cologne and Herbalife products that can never be used up is the result. And the wife is frustrated with the foods Mickey is constantly addicted to. “Why so much chips and salsa, Mickey?” Chips and salsa? Hubba hubba!
And Mickey’s old brain, full of a vast quantity of useless trivia-type knowledge, random wisdom floating around in a disconnected fashion, and prejudices formed by a bizarre obsession with things like nudism, Disney movies, comic books, model trains, and doll-collecting, becomes strangely creative. He begins to believe weird things.
For example, he thinks rabbits, if they were suddenly transformed into people, would make better people than people ever do. They are mostly quiet most of the time. They eat an all-vegetable, healthy diet. And they don’t vote Republican.
He obsessively also thinks about how his mind is working and how thinking about thinking is likely to improve thinking. He even realizes that the map of his head, provided above, doesn’t accurately reflect the many branching corridors and dead-end hallways of his actually-complicated-yet-stupid mind. He thinks that thinking too much about thinking makes you stupid.
And finally, Mickey is left with a sense of wonder about how it is entirely possible that everybody is stupid at least part of the time. And he wonders what possible things that you, dear reader, are thinking about that you consider at least somewhat stupid? You are welcome to tell him in the comments. But remember, this post is about stupid thoughts in Mickey’s head. You are perfectly free not to worry about your own stupidity.
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Filed under artwork, autobiography, commentary, feeling sorry for myself, foolishness, goofy thoughts, humor, Mickey, Paffooney, satire, strange and wonderful ideas about life
Tagged as Metacognition