Funny how the world has gone full circle. When I was a kid, I liked to be naked. I guess every kid goes through that period where they decide that clothes are simply not for them.
After all, running around buck naked is pretty fun when you’re a kid. It’s so freeing and let’s face it, when we’re a kid we can get away with a lot of things we could never do as an adult.
Case in point. When I would run around outside naked in my yard, the neighbors would just look over and say, “Oh, there goes that Zerr boy without his pants again.” If I do that today, I will end up in jail.
People have also ended up in jail for taking seemingly innocent photos of their young children in the buff. Even a photo taken while bathing your baby can get you a visit from the local constables after the photo guy at Walgreens calls them to say you are trafficking kiddy porn.
This wasn’t always the case, of course. Back in the day, it was the typical thing parents did. It wasn’t dirty or illegal. Lord knows I have had my share of pictures taken when I was buck naked. I’m still not sure why I’ve kept them, except to perhaps remind me of the days when I had a pretty decent shaped body, before all the Ho Ho’s and bottles of wine began to take their toll on me.
I even have the obligatory photo of me on a sheepskin rug. It was taken in my parent’s bedroom, more than likely after my weekly bath.
Now, I think this photo is pretty cute. I look so happy to be naked and fairly innocent for a change. I even have a pretty good pose and you can’t even see anything that is vaguely personal. My dad did a pretty good job.
Oh sure, I could have posted the photo of me standing in front of the toilet taking a wee-wee. I was even doing it hands free, obviously pretty proud of my newly acquired skill set at this stage of life. I was probably about four. I’m still not sure why that photo was every taken, but hey, it reminds me that I had a really good looking butt in my youth.
That may not seem important to some people, but as you know, most men do not have a butt at all. It’s flat as a board, as if they had a buttectomy in their youth.
I’d like to say that the naked baby pictures ended with me right there and then, but it didn’t. It continued on with my children and I’m sure somewhere in the files of photos I have boxed away there are photos of them taking their first bath or simply running amok in the house because they finally were old enough to figure out how to remove their own diaper.
Ah, the innocence of the times and of being a parent. Now that I’ve become a victim of the tremendous gravitational pull of the earth and moon, you won’t find any photos of me naked. Perhaps in my 20s when I was still a svelt youth in my prime. But certainly none after about 35.
I don’t even go out on the beach without a t-shirt these days. Oh sure, I see men with their bulbous tummies hanging out and with bigger tits than any woman I’ve ever dated, but I just can’t go there. I really don’t want to put others through the trauma of seeing me without a shirt on.
Especially since I’m not a tanning kind of guy. Not only do you have the horror of seeing a guy hefting around a few extra pounds, but you also have to shield your eyes from the blinding flash given off my my Northwest White Guy skin. No sunglasses on earth can protect you from the blinding light. My silhouette will instantly burn into your retinas.
There’s another reason why I wear the shirt. I am often worried that if I lay on the beach, soaking up the rays without anything on, someone from Greenpeace will come by and, thinking they’ve found an albino pilot whale, try to roll me back into the water.
So, my nudie days are over. Well, not quite. I do take showers so there are brief interludes of nakedness in the old housienda. I try never to look in the mirror behind the vanity as I shower, preferring to look straight ahead at the jacuzzi tub adjacent to it. I just don’t need to see that much of me.
It’s not that I don’t like my body. I do. It’s just not the small rambler it used to be. Over the years there have been additions. I’ve built on now and then, not really paying attention to the build out. So now instead of a small starter home my soul lives in a McMansion. I like to tell myself that I just needed more space to house me.
I sometimes feel like the Winchester Mansion in San Jose. You know, the one where the widow of the Winchester rifle fortune kept building night and day until she died. There were stairways to nowhere, doors that opened up to to nothing and rooms that were never finished. She believed that it would confuse the spirits of the people who died from her husband’s rifle, who would become lost in the maze of her home.
That pretty much describes my rarely naked body. Lots of room to move about but without a master plan for it. I think the reason I am rarely sick is because like the spirits in the Winchester house, viruses and bacteria simply get lost in this bulbous body of mine, wandering aimlessly in search of something to infect, only to give up all hope in the end, becoming lost in a maze of an expansion project gone wrong and one that definitely has no plan at all.
In the Emerald City, naked as a jaybird as I write this,
– Robb