I Am Not Happy… Nor Have I Ever Been
Both my father and my mother-in-law passed away on my birthday. My father in 2020 and my mother-in-law this past Sunday. I am not amused.
My health continues to deteriorate. Soon I will no longer be able to drive a car. I have Glaucoma and am slowly losing my ability to see. Tunnel vision and cataract cloudiness. My blood sugar levels are up even on Metformin. My blood pressure is finally stabilized by multiple meds.
Facebook deleted one of my WordPress posts because of nudity and sexuality. Of course, the illustrations in that piece, Nudist Notions, reveal no genitals, no female breasts, and depict no sexual acts or even sexualized poses. But I violated their nudity ban. They take revenge on that s**t. (Silt. That word is silt. Don’t ban this post.)
I prefer to write comedy. It has always been my go-to when faced with hideously terrible things. But I must confess that I have never been happy in the 68 years of my life. Not giddily, crying-for-joy happy. My secret is… I no longer hate myself and am satisfied with life. But not really capable of “happy.”
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Elsie the Cow
I was a boy back when the milk man still came around in his blue-and-white panel truck delivering bottles of milk with Elsie the Cow on them. I don’t remember clearly because I was only 4 years old back when I first became aware of being a boy in this world instead of being something else living somewhere else.
There were many things I didn’t know or understand back then. But one thing I did know, was that I loved Elsie the Cow. And why would a farm boy love a cartoon cow? There were many not-so-sensible reasons.
For one thing, Elsie the Cow reminded me of June Lockhart, Lassie’s mom and the mom from Lost in Space.
It may be that June Lockhart’s eyes reminded me of Elsie’s eyes, being large, soul-full eyes with large black eye lashes. It may be that she starred in a TV commercial for Borden’s milk in which Elsie winked at me at the end of the commercial.
Or maybe it was because Elsie had calves and was a mom. And June Lockhart was Lassie’s mom and the mom of Will Robinson, so I associated both of them with my mom, and thus with each other.
Elsie gave you milk to drink and was always taking care of you in that way. Milk was good for you, after all. My own mom was a registered nurse. So they were alike in that way too.
And she was constantly defending you against the bulls in your life. She stood up to Elmer to protect her daughter more than once. Of course, her son was usually guilty of whatever he was accused of, but she still loved him and kept Elmer from making his “hamburger” threats a reality.
And you can see in numerous ad illustrations that Elsie’s family were basically nudists. Although she often wore an apron, she was bare otherwise. And though her daughter often wore skirts and her son wore shorts, Elmer was always naked. And that didn’t surprise me, because no cow I knew from the farm wore clothes either. From very early in my life I was always fascinated by nakedness, and I would’ve become a nudist as a youngster if it hadn’t been soundly discouraged by family and society in general.
So there are many reasons why I have always loved Elsie the Cow. And it all boils down to the love of drinking milk and that appealing cartoon character who constantly asked you to drink more.
Nudist Notions
This nudist camp is entirely fictional. The actual camp in Clear Lake is a Methodist Youth Camp.
I have learned a lot more about nudists in the last few months than I probably ever wanted to know. The book I wrote about a boy being invited to go camping with the family of a girl he liked, and then finding out it was a nudist camp, was written as rough draft back in the late 1980’s about life experiences I had in the early ’80’s. Some things I learned back then have proven to still be true. Some things have changed. The things that have changed, are mostly about me.
Nudist families in touch with nature are beautiful in ways I can’t explain. It’s not the clothes the wear.
Naturists are happier than normal people. They shed a lot of their hang ups and worries with their clothes. Sunshine and cool breezes on bare skin have a healthy psychological effect. I know this from having experimented myself. Socially nudists are able to comfortably “live in their skin”. Their confidence in self translates into sensible nude social behavior. It is not about sex. Sex is private behavior to a nudist, not public. When nudists interact, the conversations occur eye to eye, not eye to somewhere else. And the acceptance of how others look when naked is a critical factor in nude social interaction being beneficial. Most nudists are not beautiful or ugly. They are a spectrum of everything in between. And they don’t talk about body parts or make comparisons. Nudist men talk about sports teams and vehicle repair and politics the same way the guys in overalls at the Nutrena Feed and Farm Store. Nudist women talk about… well, the stuff women talk about in the secret language of women that guys like me don’t understand.
Sherry Cobble at the Sunshine Club
So those things about the nudist community have not changed over time. True in the 1960’s is true today. The thing most of you don’t realize is that there are lot more nudists in the world than you are reasonably ready to admit. And the nudist community has a lot more old naturists than you probably thought possible. Naked wrinkles and beer bellies are a thing.
What I have learned about myself by joining the nudist community (though only once at only one of the several nudist camps available in sunny Texas) is that the nakedness and thoughts about nakedness in my novels is there for a reason, and it will not go away. I am trying to be a Young Adult novelist, which means my novels are basically aimed at a junior high and high school audience. I have to dance a carefully straight line between the need to be honest with naked reality and Amazon’s prohibition of adult content in YA novels. Sherry Cobble luring young boys into going camping naked with her family is on that borderline. It is not sexual content. But it is naked content and the barriers have been physically set aside. The humor caused by sexual tension can’t cross the line into bawdy or lewd or pornographic. Nor would I want it to.
But people who write fiction do it not because it’s fun. It is necessary. We have lived lives that leave us damaged in ways that can only be fixed through fiction. The world has to be reshaped in words by people who can’t live with the world the way it was. The truth is, I was sexually assaulted when I was a child, one traumatic event that clouded and warped my self-confidence, my sex life, and my self-concept. Healing has been a life-long process. In fiction, it means characters having to deal with the naked truth and make peace with it. This I believe I have done in so many different ways as a teacher, a husband, a father, and a story-teller, that it simply has to be shared. I will publish Superchicken on Amazon soon, and hopefully Edward-Andrew’s nudist adventure will pass the Amazon test. I have some nutty nudist notions in my nerdy old noodle, but in a novel, they can all be made new.
This post was originally published in November of 2017.
Filed under artwork, humor, insight, novel plans, nudes, Paffooney, strange and wonderful ideas about life
An Old Man Gets Older
This old coot is now older by a year, having had a birthday on the day I wrote this, but yesterday to be technical about it. Celebrating the big 68 is not that joyful since my father died on my birthday in 2020.
The incoming President-elect has already caused China to shift its food buying from US markets to Brazil. Now, more than 71% of the farm business in Iowa is going to be gone because of Pumpkinhead’s threatened tariffs. The fact that I own 33% of the family farm in Iowa will make that change hurt my personal economy. That’ll be me in the future pictured above, penniless and naked in the snow… well, unless climate change reaches the point that snow never falls again.
But I have decided to outlive the Pumpkinhead President. I don’t want to give him the satisfaction of robbing me of my joy. I like to be naked. I fancy myself a nudist. And I will write and say things I want to say. Pumpkinhead will never hear me. Jack-o-lanterns never have ears carved in them. And Trump doesn’t know how to listen.
And I still plan to make pictures every day that I’m still not blind.
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Anger Management Mickey Style
I am not happy. We should have been done with the Pumpkinhead Criminal four years ago. An insurrection is an act of treason. Look at how Putin dealt with his mercenary force, which simply marched back from the war front toward Moscow. Those guys are dead now. The law used to be that traitors were executed. This one gets to be a dictator.
In 2017 the Pumpkinhead really screwed me over. At that time I had been retired from teaching for three years. I had struggled to eliminate all my credit card debt and pay down medical debts. Pumpkinhead pushed through his massive tax cut for billionaires. There were also measures to raise taxes on certain classes of people who paid less taxes than the average worker. This included pensioners in education. So, even though my pension was funded by the money I paid into the pension system for teachers month by month for 31 years, he laid upon us increased taxes that went up by more than 100 dollars a month and would incrementally increase for five years after that. And then the rotted old gourd increased the massive wealth he and his billionaire friends got by retroactively making changes to the tax code apply to the entire year… from a tax law instituted in December. I suddenly had a $2,000+ tax bill that I could not pay off at tax time because no warning was given about how much more needed to be withheld from paychecks before the last month of the year. I had to file for a monthly payoff plan that lasted more than a year. I went bankrupt in 2017. Not the kind of bankruptcy that Pumpkinhead walked away from so many times, but a Chapter 13 bankruptcy where you have to have all your worldly possessions evaluated for possible attachment and make arrangements for a large monthly payout every month for five years. I have gone through this same period of rage before. I survived it by managing not to die in the pandemic and living longer than my parents to use a portion of my inheritance to pay off the bankruptcy. I also managed to outlast the Pumpkinhead who was defeated by Grandpa Biden in 2020. But now he has another impossible election win to blast me with.
I am through some of the stages of grief already. This last election was a cruel blow. I am already done with denial and bargaining. But ANGER? I would never seek to kill anybody. But I have been sorting through a number of murder fantasies. Many of them involve smashing pumpkins with hammers.
I am not, however, suited to long periods of rage and boiling anger. The clown dictator will not win against me. He can’t stop me from being a nudist because that occurs mostly in my imagination anyway. And he can probably throw me in prison for my books and my nude drawings. And he will probably deport my immigrant wife, even though she spent more than twenty years earning her US Citizenship. He cannot, however, spoil the bittersweet beauty of the poetry of life for me. I have lived a long and productive life. I have many more people who love and respect me than he does. And I do not suffer from his Narcissistic doubts and phobias.
The Pumpkinhead will not win against me. I will vote against him every chance I can get. I will testify against him before God. And I will no longer honor his MAGA Minions with responses on my Facebook and Instagram posts. I will no longer post on X. And I will get back to writing things that matter… at least to me. Firetruck You, Pumpkinhead. And I didn’t leave out the “iretr” part, so I didn’t use profanity.
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That Bluebird of Happiness
Yes, this is an old post from 2017 that is ironically about going back and rereading old posts. Sorry about that. But it made me laugh when I reread it.
I often go back and re-read old posts, particularly when I discover that someone else has read them. It is amazing to me how differently I perceive things from when I actually wrote the post. As you write, squeezing huge, boulder-sized portions of hot, magma-like burning ideas and passions out through writing orifices not nearly big enough to accommodate, you usually hate what you wrote and are still writhing in pain from the creation of it as you try to edit it, trim it and brush its unruly hair. (How’s that for a mixed metaphor to make you cringe?) But given time and distance, you can really appreciate what you wrote more than ever before. Things that you thought were the stupidest idea a man ever put in words suddenly have the power to make you laugh, or make you cry. You are able to feel the things the writing was intended to make you feel. You begin to think things like, “Maybe you are not the worst writer that ever lived, and maybe that’s not why nobody ever reads your books.” But then, of course, your sister reads the post and tells you that you write like a really old, really crabby, really ancient old man. And you use the word “really” too much too. I know I deserve that, Sis. Especially the “really” part.
Here’s a post that I reread and liked today about Bob Ross.
This is the thing about happiness; It is elusive and rare as a real-life blue bird. But capturing it for a moment is not impossible. And as long as you don’t try to salt its tail and keep it prisoner, you can encourage it to sing for you. (Much better metaphor this time, don’t you think?) 
When I am accused of being gloomy, old, and boring, I can happily admit it and make it into something funny. I am something of a conspiracy nut, but not so serious that I believe all my own assertions. For those people who took offense at this conspiracy theory of mine; Coca-Cola Mind Control, I would like to point out that “Hey, I was joking. I actually like clowns.” Even though there is a serious side to everything and there can’t be laughter without some tears, I am basically happy with the way things are.
I started listening to “Live Happy Radio” on Sunday mornings on KLUV in Dallas. They point out on their program of endlessly droning happy-talk that happiness is something that you can work at. Like humor writing in blogs, it takes practice and practice and time. They even asked me to share the word about their happy magazine and products, so I am doing exactly that right here. Sometimes you simply have to put your cynicism in a jar on the shelf next to the lock box where you keep depression and self-loathing. So you can find their Live-Happy folderol right here.
So I am bird-watching again with an eye out for the bluebird. You know the one. It is out there somewhere. And I need to hear that song one more time.
Mickey the Reader
I like to think that I am different than other readers, that the quirky, insane way I practice reading makes me somehow unique and individual. But if you have read very much of my goofy little blog, you probably realize already that I am a deeply deluded idiot most of the time. So let me explain a little about how I go about reading.
- I am basically guilty of reading anything and everything I can get my hands on. And the stupid internet puts an infinite variety in your hands. Some of it is toxic and probably will kill me… or land me in jail. (Does the NSA really care about what Mickey is reading?)
- Here is an example of my internet reading this morning; Diane Ravitch’s Education Blog , An Article from British Naturism, Rachel Poli’s Article about Fantasy Writing, and Naked Carly Art’s post about creating a painting. My browser history portrays me at times as some kind of communist brainiac pornography-loving terrorist painter or something. I hope the NSA is using telepaths to investigate me, because the reasons I look at a lot of this stuff is important. It is a good thing I don’t write mystery novels so they would be upset down in the NSA break room about my searching out creative ways to kill people.
- Besides being Eclectic with a capital “E”, I am also obsessive. My daily reading project now is Garrison Keillor’s novel, Lake Wobegon Days.
I only spend about an hour a day reading this novel, but I am totally immersed in it. I am living inside that book, remembering the characters as real people and talking to them like old friends. I tried to read that book before and couldn’t make progress because I like so much to listen to Keillor tell stories on A Prairie Home Companion on the radio and it just wasn’t the same entirely in print. When he tells a story, he pauses a lot. In fact, that moment when he stops to let you reflect on what he just said is critical to the humor because you have to stop and savor the delicious irony of the scene. His pauses are funnier than the words. Man, if he just stood there and didn’t talk at all, you would probably die laughing from it. So, in order to get into the book, I had to read it with Garrison’s voice in my head, pausing frequently the way he does. Now the stories of Clarence Bunsen and Pastor Inqvist break me up all over again. I will soon acquire and read everything he has ever written. I truly love Garrison Keillor.
So there is a description of how strange a practicing reader I am. Think about how you read. Is the NSA watching you too? Do you ever read two books at the same time? Do you read everything and anything in front of you? If you are self-reflective at all, even if you are not pathological about it the way Mickey is, you may well decide that as strange as my reading habits are, they are probably normal compared to yours.
Things Are Not Fine in Carrot Castle
We were expecting Princess Kayflower to ascend to the throne after the sudden demise of King Brusselsprouts. King B had come to be referred to as Dark Sprouts because he kept foiling the evil former King Toadstoolsniffer in his evil attempts to overthrow and usurp the Throne. Rabbits, bunnies, and hares were all believing old Brusselsprouts would live forever. He was ancient, but he had a magical way of making the carrot crops bounteous and delicious, and he sometimes said stupid things in a way extremely old rabbits often do, but he gave off an undefeatable positivity that was reassuring to the older, wiser rabbits. And then he got brain freeze from an ice cream cone and suffered a bunny stroke.
Toadstoolsniffer leaped into action on King B’s demise, mostly because Kayflower was wrapped up in grief and funeral arrangements, and spewed forth a virtual geyser of misinformation and propaganda. The fat white bunny with orange powder on his face began claiming that there were weasels on the border, and that while he lived, King B had invited them into the city of Carrot Castle and let them eat bunny children wherever and whenever they wanted. This was not true. Only two weasels had shown up at the border, and the Royal Guard Hares easily chased them off with bucktoothed bites. Toadstoolsniffer then claimed that when bunny children went to bunny school, King B would have bunnies surgically changed into kittens, and baby rabbits surgically changed into puppies. The truth was that it was completely illegal to perform any kind of surgery on bunnies and baby rabbits without parental consent and medical need. It never happened. But the general rabbit population of the city-state tended to believe anything Toadstoolsniffer said because he said it in such a bigly white-rabbit way. And of course, everyone knew that white rabbits like Toadstoolsniffer were somehow superior to all others of rabbitkind.
So, in spite of all logic, loyalty, and adherence to the truth, the rabbits of Carrot Castle made Toadstoolsniffer the new king. He, of course, swiftly made an alliance with the weasels of Stoatia, letting them come wherever and whenever t.hey wanted into the city-state. They ate Kayflower first, then quickly reduced the rabbit population by breaking into the bunny schools and eating all the bunnies they claimed were now kittens and all the baby rabbits that were now puppies. And they all lived miserably ever after… unless they got eaten.
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Catch a Falling Star 
Why Mickey Writes
If you are wondering, “How in the Heck can Mickey write nonsense like that essay he wrote yesterday?”, then please be aware that Mickey is pondering that same question.
Seriously, why would a writer publish personal thoughts and allude to personal tragedies? Especially when they are about things that once upon a time nearly killed him? (Please note that when Mickey starts a sentence with “Seriously” it is probably about to lead to a joke, the same way as when Trump says, “Believe me” we should assume he is telling a lie and knows it.)
The answer is simply, writers write stuff. They have to. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be writers.
It is really not something to do to earn fame and fortune. Fame and fortune happen to rare individuals like J. K. Rowling and Steven King… and even Stephanie Meyer, to prove that it is totally random and not based on actual writing talent… except for sometimes.
You write to get your head right about bad things that happen in life. You find that factor in Mark Twain whose infant son died, as well as most of the rest of his family, before him, forcing him to face survivor’s guilt and the notion that life is random and death does not come for you based on any kind of merit system. Charles Dickens wrote about the foibles of his father, on whom he based the David Copperfield character Wilkins Micawber, a man who was overly optimistic and constantly landing in debtor’s prison because of it. He also wrote in his stories about the women he truly loved (who were not, it seems, his wife) one of whom died in his arms while yet a teenager. Dickens’ amused take on the innate foolishness of mankind gave him a chance to powerfully depict great tragedies both large (as in a Tale of Two Cities) and small (as in Oliver Twist). I wrote yesterday’s post based on the connection between the nudity I write about in novels and my own traumatic assault when I was only ten.
You write because you have wisdom, an inner personal truth, that you are convinced needs to be crystallized in words and written down on paper. It isn’t necessarily real truth. Lots of idiots write things and post them in newspapers, blogs, and even books. And it is often true that their inner personal truth is complete hogwash. (But, hey, at least the hogs are cleaner that way.) Still, your wisdom is your own, and it is true for you even if some idiot like Mickey reads it and thinks it is only fit for cleaning hogs.
And you truly do have to write. If I did not write my stupid, worthless novels, all the hundreds of characters in my head would get mad and start kicking the pillars that hold up the structures in my head. I do have structures in my head. My mind is organized in boxes that contain specifically sorted ideas and stories and notions. It is not a festering stew pot where everything is mixed together and either bubbling or boiling with hot places or coagulating in the cold corners. (That is how I picture Donald Trump’s mind. It is certainly not an empty desert like many people think, because deserts don’t explode all over Twitter early in the morning like the stew pot metaphor obviously would.)
And so, I have done it again. I have set down my 500+ words for today and made a complete fool of myself. And why do I do it? Because Mickey is a writer, and so, Mickey writes stuff.
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Filed under artwork, autobiography, commentary, humor, insight, irony, Mark Twain, Mickey, Paffooney, strange and wonderful ideas about life, wisdom, writing humor
Tagged as goofy thoughts on writing