For the last 25 years of my life, I have been laboring to create hand-made books filled with my magical research and spells. The two in the back are scrapbooks filled with printed images, drawings, poems, and short autobiographical compositions. I collect in them things I mean to weave into fiction, things I mean to use as models for artwork. The two in the foreground are completely cartoon stories in rough draft form. These are not books I ever mean to have published. They are filled with things I intend to use in my work at some future time. Many of these images and poems I have used already somewhere. But there are many, many more. That makes these tomes something of a treasure… at least to me.
I managed to finally return to Bluebonnet Nudist Park on Saturday. It was a Memorial Day weekend crowd, so I got to meet a lot of naked people. Of course, I only saw one kid the whole time I was there, and he looked to be high-school-aged. So, don’t let the first picture in this post fool you. Most nudists at the park were closer to my age than the girls in the picture.
But it was freeing of spirit to actually gather around a swimming pool and have an all-you-can-eat hot-dog lunch with 50-plus other naked people. I can’t explain why that strange alchemy can work. But it does.
Having been around nudists at different times for the majority of my life, I can honestly say I have observed nudists to be happier people than the rest of us. Of course, that is a generalization, and not true of every individual nudist. But they are comfortable in their own skin and connected to the natural world the way most of us are not. I found that most of these people knew they were nudists since childhood. Like me, if their families did not already embrace being nudists, they sneaked off to the woods when they could to get naked in nature.
Am I alone in thinking that this is not a mental aberration, but rather, a natural instinct that was trained out of us (or in my case, almost trained out of us,) in childhood?
I don’t have any pictures from the nudist park to post, so I use the usual collection of innocent-seeming illustrations and pictures to add a sense of beauty and youthfulness to the idea of going to a nudist park for recreation. You know its not really the way the pictures show it. I am not the exhibitionist-sort of nudist whose whole desire is to be seen by the world naked. I, for the most part, am a solitary nudist. Not too proud of my lumpy, wrinkled, and sore-covered carcass so that I am obsessed with others seeing me, but also not ashamed of my corporeal self to the point of not allowing myself to be seen nude by other like-minded nude people. Most of my nudism occurs when I am alone in private places where only peeping Toms and computer-camera hackers can see me. I am, however, proud that I have now been to Bluebonnet twice and have a membership in AANR (American Association for Nude Recreation.)
While I was there, a journalist who writes books on American culture used in sociology research at the college level, was there taking pictures and interviewing folks. He spoke to us, confessing that it was the first time speaking to a group of naked people, and also his first time speaking to a group while naked. He explained that he was recording and documenting interesting and important social organizations in an area only 100 miles wide, but stretching from the Mexican border to the Canadian border through the middle of the US. He felt that there were important things to learn about American life from the Bluebonnet Nudist Park just as there were to learn from the Dallas Police Department which he had scheduled for the upcoming week (and he specified he would be wearing clothes for that next part.) Even though I was there for his research, I did not get asked to sign any consent forms for photographs or interviews, so I will not be in that book of his in any way.
I am definitely more confident now in identifying myself as a nudist. I never embraced the idea of actually being one while I was a school teacher in Texas. Texans are suspicious of even letting a Democrat be a public school teacher, let alone someone who purposely goes to a public place with no pants on. I know I have lost Twitter followers and Facebook friends who found out I was actually a nudist. And I feel like I may have lost some of my WordPress followers over it as well. They can’t take seriously someone who walks around with no clothes on.
But my answer to that is… Who in the heck takes Mickey seriously anyway? Get real!
My dog is dying. She has a big old ugly tumor. Doggy breast cancer.
I may be dying, going blind, losing the ability to pee. You know, old man complaints.
My wife wrecked her car on the trailer hitch of a truck that stopped fast in front of her, so we are now a one-car family, and I am doing even more walking.
I am having trouble concentrating and doing very little writing now.
Life sucks at the moment.
But I am entitled to some hardship and downtime. I have published three more writing projects in less than a year. Naked Thinking, The Amazing Aero Brothers, and Evil Poetry brought me to 24 books in my active oeuvre. So, maybe my brain needs a rest.
One never knows what mysteries can be uncovered inside the bird house. The plot of the story depends on what happens next in the picture.Details make the real story clear.Pictures tell a story even if the story-teller falls asleep in the process.A picture can spin a fairy-tale even if it doesn’t show a plot. Pictures easily establish a setting.Pictures can allude to many, many other things.
So, I am trying to use what I am learning from AI art programs to help me do a better job of promoting my writing adventures with the loopy, unrealistic goal of making money with books. I know… stupid Mickey thinks authors ought to make some money off the books they’ve published too. What a stupid guy that Mickey is. He doesn’t know that money made from books on Amazon goes 99% to Jeff Bezos. He’s the one risking death in space inside his super penis rocket. That means he deserves the larger share of any money my writing may have earned on his super, super-sized everything delivery service. All hail the penis-flying bald man who invented sending books everywhere by drones!
So, let me go ahead with the promotional picture I created for the nudist short-story collection, Adventures Without Clothes. My story, “The Kelpie” is in this book which sends all proceeds to Doctors Without Borders. Good book. Good story by me. Great nudist fiction by Ted Bun, Will Forest, Paul Z Walker, and other contributors from the naturist/nudist fiction creators from the internet. It is doing better profitwise than any other book that I am associated with, including my very best books..
You can see I posed naked in the mountains with the book to lend a sense of adventure to the promotion. I actually posed naked for this picture, since I am supposedly a nudist myself. My wife and daughter refused to have anything to do with the taking of this photograph. I had to learn how to make my computer tablet take the picture according to voice commands. And the mountains didn’t want to be in the picture either (Which caused me no grief since I didn’t want to freeze my personal dillybonger off.) I cheated by inserting the mountains with Picsart AI photo editor. Dillybonger saved, mountain and family not embarrassed to death.
So, naturally, you now want to click on the link above to get your personal copy of this wonderful book based on my fabulous naked promo picture.
So, let’s try that same thing again with another recent book, my book of Evil Poetry bound in paperback form under a black cover with a large skull on it. That’s the way to sell a book of poetry, right? By calling it evil and failing to scare you with another picture of my horrid naked self. The brown shirt is not photoshopped on. I was really wearing clothes this time. The waterfall is again an invention of Picsart AI.
Of course, good poetry is capable of many things. It can make you laugh. It can make you cry. It can make you hurt. And it can make you die (at least a little. Besides, cry and die rhyme a little.)
And nowhere am I claiming this is good poetry. It is probably, definitely not GOOD POETRY. I condemn it wholly as EVIL POETRY in the very title. You should try it anyway. I was good in the picture, wearing my clothes and everything. And if you like poetry there are some things you may like in this book. And if you hate poetry, you will definitely find things here to bolster that point of view. And it is illustrated with some good to mediocre artwork.
So, now you know what happens when a dumb guy is allowed to play with AI and digital tools. And also allowed to promote his own books with his own naked pictures and terrible jokes.
Before you go into panic mode, let me clearly state: No college or high school was actually foolish enough to invite Mickey to give the commencement address to its graduates. So, don’t worry about a generation of our youth actually taking to heart the advice Mickey is about to give and ruining our world for the next twenty years. This is just the insane drivel that Mickey would say if some superintendent, principal, or college dean were actually stupid enough to ask.
This is not Mickey. It is either George Applebee, or it is Red Skelton pretending to be George, depending on how literal or gullible your brain is.
The most impressive commencement speech I remember from my life in education was given in 1974 by my favorite high school English teacher, Mr. Sorum. He was a gifted speaker and told a mean joke whenever a joke was needed to make the point.
He talked for forty-five minutes about “Taking the next bite of the hot dog.”
Of course, he was talking about a metaphor where the hot dog was a life of being a good citizen and living in service to the greater good. High school graduation, in this speech, was the first bite of the hot dog. Some of us were listening to what Mr. Sorum was actually saying. My second bite of the hot dog was to get an English degree from Iowa State University. My third bite was a teaching degree from the University of Iowa. The fourth was choosing a life of service by being a public school English teacher. So, I followed his advice.
Most of my class, though, took that speech to mean life was all about eating hot dogs. Was I wrong? Do I need to rethink my life?
This is not Mickey either. This is Boris Karloff in makeup having a cigarette, or possibly being Frankenstein’s monster.
If I am going to give advice to today’s graduates, the advice I would have to give is, “For God’s sakes, don’t choose to be a public school teacher! Do you have any idea how hard that job is for how little reward (practically none of it in money?)”
So, what advice do I have for actually doing something with your life that helps with the common good?
The most important one; “After you go to the bathroom, flush! Gol dangit!And afterwards, wash your danged hands!“
You wouldn’t believe what kind of bacteriological nightmares are being placed in your hand daily if you have a job where you are supposed to regularly shake hands.
This is Mickey. Or possibly a two-eyed cyclops giving the world the ultimate stink-eye.
Another key recommendation;; “Stop being so gosh-darned ugly!”
Of course, you know that this is not a matter of whether you have a pretty face or you scare rats in dark rooms. This is a matter of behavior. A matter of how many people you hate and treat with scorn and injustice, as well as who you routinely hate, and why you hate them. Hating anyone for any reason is not good for their health and is even worse for yours.
And a final thought about how to improve the world; “Figure out what and who you love in this world. Everyone needs to have something and someone to love and work at sharing your life energy with.” People need other people and they need a purpose, even if they have to forge that purpose out of cardboard, imagination, and thin air.
If, by chance, you can already handle all of these things that idiot Mickey is lecturing you about, especially if these things come naturally to you, then totally ignore that first dumb thing Mickey said. Think seriously about becoming a teacher. What you have we desperately need more of. And with your expertise passed on to others, we might just be able to make more of it.
As a boy, drawing girls was always important to me. I didn’t understand them. I couldn’t control them other than to make them dislike me. I couldn’t get away from them… but I could draw them. I could completely control what the picture looked like. And I could make them be whatever I wanted.
Lines and shapes and contours… a smirk on the lips… a twinkle in the eye.
Catch a Falling Star 
Free to Be Naked
I managed to finally return to Bluebonnet Nudist Park on Saturday. It was a Memorial Day weekend crowd, so I got to meet a lot of naked people. Of course, I only saw one kid the whole time I was there, and he looked to be high-school-aged. So, don’t let the first picture in this post fool you. Most nudists at the park were closer to my age than the girls in the picture.
But it was freeing of spirit to actually gather around a swimming pool and have an all-you-can-eat hot-dog lunch with 50-plus other naked people. I can’t explain why that strange alchemy can work. But it does.
Having been around nudists at different times for the majority of my life, I can honestly say I have observed nudists to be happier people than the rest of us. Of course, that is a generalization, and not true of every individual nudist. But they are comfortable in their own skin and connected to the natural world the way most of us are not. I found that most of these people knew they were nudists since childhood. Like me, if their families did not already embrace being nudists, they sneaked off to the woods when they could to get naked in nature.
Am I alone in thinking that this is not a mental aberration, but rather, a natural instinct that was trained out of us (or in my case, almost trained out of us,) in childhood?
I don’t have any pictures from the nudist park to post, so I use the usual collection of innocent-seeming illustrations and pictures to add a sense of beauty and youthfulness to the idea of going to a nudist park for recreation. You know its not really the way the pictures show it. I am not the exhibitionist-sort of nudist whose whole desire is to be seen by the world naked. I, for the most part, am a solitary nudist. Not too proud of my lumpy, wrinkled, and sore-covered carcass so that I am obsessed with others seeing me, but also not ashamed of my corporeal self to the point of not allowing myself to be seen nude by other like-minded nude people. Most of my nudism occurs when I am alone in private places where only peeping Toms and computer-camera hackers can see me. I am, however, proud that I have now been to Bluebonnet twice and have a membership in AANR (American Association for Nude Recreation.)
While I was there, a journalist who writes books on American culture used in sociology research at the college level, was there taking pictures and interviewing folks. He spoke to us, confessing that it was the first time speaking to a group of naked people, and also his first time speaking to a group while naked. He explained that he was recording and documenting interesting and important social organizations in an area only 100 miles wide, but stretching from the Mexican border to the Canadian border through the middle of the US. He felt that there were important things to learn about American life from the Bluebonnet Nudist Park just as there were to learn from the Dallas Police Department which he had scheduled for the upcoming week (and he specified he would be wearing clothes for that next part.) Even though I was there for his research, I did not get asked to sign any consent forms for photographs or interviews, so I will not be in that book of his in any way.
I am definitely more confident now in identifying myself as a nudist. I never embraced the idea of actually being one while I was a school teacher in Texas. Texans are suspicious of even letting a Democrat be a public school teacher, let alone someone who purposely goes to a public place with no pants on. I know I have lost Twitter followers and Facebook friends who found out I was actually a nudist. And I feel like I may have lost some of my WordPress followers over it as well. They can’t take seriously someone who walks around with no clothes on.
But my answer to that is… Who in the heck takes Mickey seriously anyway? Get real!
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Tagged as naturism, naturist, Nudism, nudist, travel