I have known nudists for a long time, since the 1980’s in fact. I have recently dabbled my toes in the cold waters of being a nudist myself. I did work on pool cracks this past summer while naked. I made one visit to a nudist park and actually got naked in front of strangers who were also naked. It is a certain kind of crazy connection to nature, my self, and the bare selves of others to be a nudist, even if it is for only a few hours. I used to think nudists were crazy people. But I have begun to understand in ways that are hard to understand. And being a novelist, that was bound to creep into the piles of supposedly wise understanding that goes into the creation of novels. I say “supposedly wise” because wisdom is simply the lipstick on the pig of ridiculous human experiences.
The Cobble family appeared first in my novel, Superchicken. It is a semi-autobiographical novel that uses some of my real life experiences and the real life experiences of boys I either grew up with or taught, mixed in with bizarre fantasy adventures that came from my perceptions of life as an adult. So the Cobble family really represent my encounters with nudism and the semi-sane people known as nudists. Particularly important to the story are the Cobble Sisters, twins Sherry and Shelly, who fully embrace the idea of being nudists and try to get other characters to not only approve of the behavior, but share in it. Sherry is the more forward of the two, more willing to be seen naked by the boys in her school and in her little Iowa farm town. Shelly is the quieter of the two, a bit more shy and a lot more focused on the love of one particular boy.
In fact, the Cobble Sisters are based on real life twin blond girls from my recollections of the past. The Cobble farm is out along the Iowa River and just north of Highway Three in Iowa. It is a real place where real twin girls lived when I was a boy. They were blond and pretty and outgoing. But they were not actually nudists. There was another pair of twin blond girls from my first two years of teaching who actually provided the somewhat aggressively sensual personalities of the Cobble Sisters. The real nudists I knew were mostly in Texas.
The sisters appear in more than one of the novels I have written or am in the process of writing. They appear for the second time in the novel Recipes for Gingerbread Children which I finished writing in 2016. They are also a part of the novel I am working on now, The Baby Werewolf. That last is probably the main reason they are on my mind this morning. Writing a humorous horror story about werewolves, nudists, pornographers, and real wolves is a lot more complex and difficult than it sounds. But it is hopefully doable. And my nudist characters are all basically representative of the idea that all honest and straight-forward people are metaphorically naked all the time. That’s the thing about those nudist twins. They don’t hide anything. Not their most private bits, and certainly not what they are thinking at any given time.
So as I continue to struggle with revealing myself as a writer… and possibly as a nudist as well, I will count on the Cobble Sisters to make certain important points about life and love and laughter… and how you can have all three while walking around naked.
Both novels discussed in this old post are now available from Amazon in self-published, finished form.
Here is the link for this book;
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And its companion book and an intertwined story is easily found here;
Catch a Falling Star 
Body Image Advice for Truly Ugly People
Yes, I, of all people, should probably not be trying to give advice to ugly people. I have some wisdom about ugliness to share, but only by participation in the world as a member of that class of people that ordinary folk would really, really, extremely importantly not want to see naked. I am not Boris Karloff’s Mummy unwrapped, but I am in no way pretty under my clothes.
So why would anybody with six incurable diseases, one of which is a skin disease that involves reddish pink bleedy spots, ever contemplate becoming a nudist?
Well, horrible as I am, I have had a lifelong yearning for a life lived naked. I recently found an online quiz thing that asked the question, “Should you become a nudist?” Here is the result it gave me;
So, apparently, I have nudist tendencies. I have been concealing a long-standing desire to throw off all my clothes and walk around naked all the time. And I have been doing it all my life. But I am not some mentally ill pervert, or even an exhibitionist. I just have an innate feeling, as I suspect most people do, that I was meant to live a more natural life wearing only the things that God clothed me with. When I think of myself naked, I try to think of myself more like the boy I have drawn here to picture the feelings I have about nudity;
There is a certain innocence and rightness involved in being nude. I don’t generally push it in people’s faces. I don’t plaster a bunch of naked pictures of myself on the internet. Some nudists do. I see a lot of naked people on Twitter now that I have written articles for nudist blogs and joined a couple of nudist websites. But they are not Playboy magazine nudes. They are more often than not the slightly overweight, blobby sort of people that look like oddly bulbous stacks of uncooked pancake dough. They are the kind of unfettered and unashamed personal body images that go a long way toward making me feel better about my fat old blobby-spotty self. If people like that can be proud of their naked form, then my bugged-out eyes help convince my stupid head that I could do it too.
I have been to a nudist park precisely one time. As chronicled in this blog last July, I visited the Bluebonnet Nudist Park in Alvord, Texas. I have been naked in the presence of other naked people. And it really is a liberating experience. Being seen naked by naked girls is not nearly as soul-crushingly embarrassing as I once believed. Especially since being a nudist is in no way about sex. In fact, lewd behavior of any kind gets you kicked out of a nudist park faster than if you were doing the same thing at the Ballpark at Arlington for a Texas Rangers baseball game. (Most of those lewd dudes, admittedly, were fueled more by alcohol than hormones.) Those people at the nudist park did not look at me, scream in horror, and run away. They looked me in the eye, smiled, and talked to me as if I were the same as they are.
So my advice to sincerely ugly people, based on my own experiences as a bug-ugly human being is… become a nudist. Learn to accept your whole ugly, horrible self as an ordinary human being with no artificial veneer. Do not cover up who you actually are. Then, you may begin to see that what you always thought of as ugliness and horribleness is really beauty and grace and healthy human-ness.
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Tagged as Bluebonnet nudist park, body image, humor, nudists