I hate television. I don’t think I’ve ever owned one that got channels. I have to admit though, occasionally through cultural osmosis a show or a character will capture my attention, and hold the poor hyperactive little thing hostage until it wastes away. They can’t survive in captivity, you know. My favorite shows often are ones where outsiders; whether space-alien, foreigner, android, or just someone neuro-atypical are stuck trying to make sense of our world. Through their clean-slate eyes we’re shown the absurdities of things we’ve been raised to accept. They remind us to question our norms, traditions, taboos, pop-culture, and most importantly, our everything. That childlike questioning is something I try to never let slip away. And so, from this standpoint, I gotta tell ya, clothes don’t always make a whole lotta sense.

Instead of pretending your a new-born alien-android from a dark-matter multiverse let’s try an easier thought experiment. (If you don’t know, thought experiment is what pretentious people call playing make-believe.) Imagine if you met someone who’s chosen a handful of body parts to hide under two layers of tight cloth. Their ears perhaps, because they’re afraid someone’ll judge them on their size. Or maybe they refused to take off a kinda bra-thing from their nose because someone told them it was a dirty, slimy, part. Or their mouth might live under a surgical mask because they’re embarrassed they like to have their lovers fuck them there. It doesn’t matter, the point is they plan to keep them covered just about every moment, of every day, for their entire life.

Admittedly, I’ve never conducted this test, as it’s just a thought experiment, but my thought results have everyone believing that this person is a straight-up nut-job. “It’s silly and unhealthy.” says one thought experimenter.  “They should let those things air-out and get a little sun.” said another thought volunteer.

Though I must agree with these imaginary friends of mine, it is kinda amusing to picturing this oddball not wanting to get their face-holes-clothes wet while taking a dip, and having to find a secluded spot to change real quickly into their special wet-getting swimming clothes.

In this country we call swimming without clothes “skinny-dipping.” You know what they call it other places? Swimming. And here, in the Land of the Free, one can’t do that in their own pool, sunbathe on their lawn, or even walk around their house nude without the curtains drawn. I tell ya, the more one travels, the more they realize that this nation that brags so much about freedom, has more rules than a lot that don’t feel the need to. (But that’s a topic for another week.) And there certainly is more to judging a place than by the size of it law books. In fact, technically, right now it’s legal in 33 states for women to go topless any place a man can. But it’s not surprising few take them up on it except in protest. Our norms, traditions, and taboos are far more powerful than any laws. And shame of our bodies is so embedded is our culture that a woman taking her top off can still be considered revolutionary.

It may seem strange to some of us, but right now there are a women all over the world who are fighting for their right to wear the burqa, niqab, or hijab. Why? Because for them it’s about modesty and decency. They say they enjoy saving themselves for only their lover’s eyes. And because they don’t want people gawking at, or objectifying, them… In short, because they’d feel ‘naked’ without them.

It’s not difficult to imagine a Western woman on a beach going off on a woman in a Burqini. (Yes, that’s a thing.) Giving some beautiful, and true, tirade about it, and in the next breath getting indignant when someone suggests she remove her bathing-suit to beat the heat. But hay, I’m no apologist, I agree that it’s an arcane tradition woven into the very fabric of an entire society based on an oppressive and misogynistic religion… Oh wait, which one was I talking about again?

Whether because it’s a sin, or against the law, or just plain wrong we’re taught, almost from birth, that one of our most important jobs in life is to hide our bodies. And when we’re all playing this strange game of hide-and-seek, and only perfectly sculpted celebrities are allowed to play show-and-tell, that can’t help but warp our ideas about how humans are supposed to look. I suspect that in a world where people would be exposed to all different body types they’d be able to feel better about their own uniqueness. But of course that’s just a thought experiment, in our world most have yet to even be comfortable being naked around themselves.

With guarded optimism though, I hope that this information (overload) age we’re exploding into, with its addiction to exposing everything, will be able to bring about the death of shame. I wonder, in a world where everyone has a camera on them at all times, how long can any, even slightly adventurous, soul hold on to their self-consciousness? Growing up, getting fucked up, fucking things up. Parties, skinny-diping, mooning and flashing. Mardi Gras, Burning Man, Woodstock. Every little embarrassing thing caught on film and shown to the world. I can’t see how anyone’ll make it out of college with their modesty in tact. I wouldn’t’ve made it out of high school.

For better or for worse one day no one may have any secrets and that’ll just be the norm, but we’re not there quite yet so we still have to deal with some pretty fucked up shit sometimes. Every so often some peeping-tom/burglar sneaks into a woman’s safest and most secure area to steal her most privet things. Privet photographs of herself that were to be given as a gift to her lover. Unarguably this crime is a violation – unless it’s committed by cyber-lowlifes and the women they steal from chose acting as their careers. Then the discussion becomes whether these woman somehow brought it upon themselves. The correct answer to this question is, of course, “Fuck you!”

“Should these women have the audacity to take photos of their nakedness and give them to other consenting adults?” Fuck you!

Not only is there nothing wrong with someone feeling comfortable enough in their own skin to pose nude, it’s marvelous they’ve found the courage in themselves, and the appreciation in another to give such a gift.

“Do these women have a right to privacy even if they choose to act for a living?” Fuck you!

For some reason we don’t like to think of famous people, as people. We elevate and dehumanize them into strange, unfeeling celebrities. We think because we spend our 15 bucks to see them in a new movie every few years we deserve to know everything about them, even if they have some silly notion of holding on to even the smallest shred of privacy – like naked images of themselves. But hay, they should’ve know better, right? No, Fuck you!

“Should I look at these very privet things that were stolen and distributed against the wishes of the only people who had a right to look at them?” Most people don’t even wonder before sitting down with google and lube. I bet you can guess the correct answer. Fuck you!

Think of it this way, if there was an app that allowed you to peek through a celebrity’s computer into their privet life, when they specifically expressed their displeasure at the idea, would it be ok to look? No, of course not. Any rationalization you can come up with is wrong.

“Was it a mistake for these women to take nude pictures of themselves?” Fuck you.

As comforting at it is to our psyches to blame the victim (a topic for another week) these people, of course, did nothing wrong. Again, I’ve a romanticized view of nudie pictures, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I see them as full of empowerment and strength and trust and all kinds of beauty. And something to be proud of no matter what.

As a younger traveler, I’d march through the airport draped in rags held together with chains, safety-pins, and bits of shredded patriotism. Like gutter royalty I wore a crown of multicolored dreadlocks spiking in every direction. Upon my shoulders hung all the weight of the world in a pack with an upside-down American flag on it. Yes, I took a certain amount of pride in looking like the homeless child of a drug-addicted parrot and a second-hand motorcycle. I’m now too old to remember why, but when we were young we tried to wear as much of our identities on our outer shells as we could. If we didn’t, we ran the risk of being a ‘sell out.’ I suspect this, ‘selling out’ is an alien concept to my younger readers, and one I don’t know where to begin to explain – so just know that at the end of the last century it was a cardinal sin. Needless to say, one of the costs of this integrity was getting ‘randomly selected for further screening’ more times than statistics would suggest possible.

Today I am older, wiser, and have far fewer fun options for my thinning hair. Not to mention I’m in a longterm, committed (polyamorous) relationship, so I no longer need the complimentary body cavity searches. So unless traveling by courier-flight or container-ship I do my best to dress in the costume of a fine, upstanding, nonthreatening, and definitely not smuggling anything, tourist.

We don’t need scientific studies to tell us that how we dress changes the way people see and think about us. Hell, we know how judgy we are and can only assume that everyone else has got to be worse. Every time we’re out in public our heads are full of, “That person looks cool.” “That one must be a cop.” “I wonder what I can score off that one?” We’re human and it’s just part of how we make sense of the world. The only problem is, it’s a shitty system. Nowadays we’re focusing more and more on what covers our bodies rather then the body’s language itself. With a little make-over people can get us to believe just about anything they want about them. And as much as we might not want to admit it, on some level, we know this to be true – and we use it all the time

Every time we pick out clothes; if we choose to wear a black top and black bottom, or wear shorts instead of trousers, hair up or down, glasses or contacts, we have, in the back of our minds, what we suspect our friends and strangers will think about that. Yes, even if we say, ‘fuck it’ and choose the uniform of someone who’s trying to send the message that they don’t give a shit about the way they look.

So much of our identities are tied up in the cloth we wrap around ourselves it can be hard to acknowledge that we often dress for the reactions of others. Sometimes we want attention, or to please. Other times it’s to blend in, or be intimidating enough to be left alone. But it’s all the same thing. Everything we wear is a costume, uniform, disguise, or mask. The strange thing is though, how we dress not only effects the way the world treats us, it also effects how we treat ourselves. Simply put, we feel and act differently when we’re all gussied up as opposed to in our old kome stained over-alls, or when we’re only in the garb of Eden.

Whenever I take self-portraits it’s always the same thing. I try outfit after outfit but none is quite right. They only capture a small piece of who I am. Each one a different lie of omission. So I convince myself to have a little wine. Try yet another outfit. Then i talk myself into showing a little skin. A little more wine, and a little more skin. And before I know it, I’m wearing nothing but a smile under hot lights, on a strange backdrop, and in front of the cold, cycloptic eye of my SLR. Well, to make a long, hard, story short, sometime before dawn, I always wind up taking advantage of myself.

Nude portraits just feel more honest; shedding all those societal roles, leaving them in heaps on the floor and standing proud with nothing to hide. That feels closer to our true Selves.

It’s strange looking back over my last 15 or so years of nudes; watching myself loose and gain muscle and fat – dye, dread, shave, and regrow my hairs – getting tattooed, and getting more, and watching them fade with age.

I now have highways of ink that run from my ankles to my neck. “Tattoos like mile markers map the distance gone.” as the song goes. I love all the little ways I’ve adorned this body-temple of mine, all its markings have great meaning to me – but also, with getting them I feel that I’ve lost something as well. Because of them I can never truly be au naturel again. It’s as if I’ve had the designs from my favorite articles of clothing surgically implanted under my skin. If I had it all to do over again, I don’t think I would get tattooed. But now that I’ve started, why the fuck stop now.

It’s nice to have this photographic evidence of my aging. It makes me feel closer to the person I’ve been. It’s gratifying to watch him grow and evolve. And now that my years are becoming more apparent I may take even more, because there’s beauty in that too… Not to mention, as with us all, this is the youngest, and probably best, I’ll ever look.

So i guess the moral of this story is that you should pose nude for some beautiful and proud portraits. One day, when like me, you’re old and gray, and can no longer recognize yourself under all the slipping skin, you’ll be able to look at the record of your youth and vitality immortalized, smile and say, “wasn’t I something.”

I know I have a romanticized view of nudie pictures but what can I say, I’m part naturist, both physically and philosophically, if such a thing is possible. I believe one of the most important things we can do is find out who we truly are beneath what culture has groomed us to want to be.  I of course realize that “know thyself” has been said once or twice before, but today our entire world seems designed to keep us from deep introspection. Boredom, we’re taught, is a sin, and contemplation is a waste of time. But that’s where change begins. That’s how we become better people, by looking deeply into our undisguised selves, (genital) warts and all, and finding the things that we can improve.

Perhaps the world is so full of mass distraction because when we get quiet moments to scrape away the shit that society has coated us in, and examine ourselves, naked and honestly, we often find that our core values don’t exactly jive with its. But what can we do when we find we no longer want what we’re supposed to want? “To thine own self be true” is another old platitude we take for granted. It’s not easy being in conflict with the culture you’re drowning in, but just knowing that you’re doing what’s right and natural for you, can be as grounding, and as frightening, as gravity. And that’s how the world changes, people thinking for themselves. Like good heretics.

“Without deviation from the norm progress is not possible.” ~ Frank Zappa

(Title stolen from, but unrelated to, Angel Dust)

Do you know who you are? Of course you do. You can look around at your life and see the answer as plain as day. Your job, your home, your (sex) toys, the people you choose to be stuck with, it’s all kinda just a physical manifestation, or representation of you, right? I mean, obviously we’ve surrounded ourselves with the things that make us happy, so that must say something about us. Right?
But why is it then that sometimes we’re just so sick of it all? Slowly falling out of love with one part of our lives at a time? Some of this shit, not

only can we not remember getting it, but we can’t even remember why we would’ve wanted it in the first place. So who was it that said this is what we wanted? Oh yeah, we did. These are the fruits of the seeds we planted long ago.

You know who you are, right? Of course you do. You remember, maybe it was high-school or college, after you did that stint as a ‘rebellious youth,’ by the time you came out of that you’d ‘found yourself,’ or whatever less melodramatic people call it. You might not be able to recall too much from that time, but you remember being sure of that. Like you were so sure of everything back then, back when the world was still black and white, before it all went and grayscaled on you.

Most people figure out who they are, and/or what they want to be, in their late teens or early twenties. This is when we set into motion the machinery that will carry us throughout the rest of our lives. Or at least until retirement, rehab, or revolution. The thing is though, no one ever told us that that’s fucking insane! The powers-that-be tell us we cant be trusted with beer at that age, but that that’s when we’re supposed to be laying the groundwork for how we’re going to spend our time until we die. No one ever mentions that every conversation we have, every sunrise and set we see, and every truck-stop quicky, changes us a little. (Or if anyone did say it, we weren’t listening because we knew everything, and we knew it better than they did.) Eventually though, we stumble over that little nugget of ‘ha-ha fuck-you’ when we wake up one day and realize we’ve lost that person we found half a lifetime ago, but we’re still surrounded by their ridiculous and useless shit!
But look on the bright-side, it’s nothing a little structure fire can’t fix.

Of course you know who you are. You’ve got a head full of memories. What are we if not walking autobiographies? The thing is though, the more science finds out about how we remember things, the more it learns that we’re all so much more full of shit than even we, ourselves, had imagined. We all know that we can sometimes sacrifice the truth upon the alter of Good Story Telling, but what most of us don’t know is that this happens every time we recall something.

Experiments on how we encode memories suggest that instead of being like cold, hard, surveillance footage, our memories are really as viscous and malleable as fresh oil paint. But to relate our brain-meats to a computer anyway, whenever we open up a file in our memory, that file becomes extremely vulnerable to accidental editing. So when we’re retelling a story; the situation we’re in, the way we feel, who’s underwear we’ve got on, and the people we are at that moment, all inadvertently change that memory. So the next time you recall it, it’ll have a little different tone, or even details. And after a while, that can really add up. Therapists are now using this to help soften the flashbacks for sufferers of PTSD.

We’re always amazed whenever someone else’s version of a shared tale comes in direct conflict with our perfect, infallible, memories. They, of course, are also wondering, “How could they be so wrong?” Though it’s counterintuitive, whichever one has recalled that memory less over the years, is the one with the more accurate version.

In short, all we think we’re sure of about our pasts, and thusly ourselves, are really just shifting lies we tell ourselves, often to reduce cognitive dissidence… Or at least that’s the way I remembered learning it.

But none of that matters, you know who you are because you know how you think and feel about things, right? But really what we think of as ‘emotions’ are an insult to feeling. We like to believe we feel things in simple, black-and-white, easy to describe ways, but really most of the time our real feelings about things are so nuanced there are no simple words for them. Like, dislike, indifferent, love, hate, mad, sad, scared, happy, disgusted, and aroused, are all oversimplifications that can’t capture the complexities about how we really feel about most things. This can cause real confusion when someone or thing won’t fit in the little box we try to keep it/them in in our heads.

Also (though we might re-wright our memories to convince ourselves otherwise) we’re constantly changing our opinions over time. Think of all the things you’ve done that you said you’d never, all the things you now see from an older, and wiser of course, point of view. Think of your changes in taste; music, priorities, lovers, places to live, hopes for the future. And I bet there’s been a whole lotta change over the last 20 years. So were we more or less ‘us’ back then? How about in the years to come?

But wait, I’m just over complicating things, I have a tendency to do that. You can just go over to the mirror and see who you are. But the person reflected back at us in the glass has grown, taller, wider, and grayer (in some cases). Definitely not the same person we see in old photos. Not outside or in. In fact, if we compare pictures of us from the early part of our lives to ones from the end, no one would be able to tell they were the same person. One day you’ll be staring naked into a mirror trying to find the young, beautiful, healthy, person you are today. Enjoy your-self while you can.
Science tells us that thanks to regeneration; every single cell in your liver is replaced with a brand-spanking-new one every 300-500 days. Thank fucking god. And all your Red Blood Cells are new every120 days. The cells of your skin every 2-4 weeks. The lining of stomach and intestines every 5 days or so. In short, every 7-10 years just about every cell in our bodies is new. And we are, down to the molecular level, different people.

So why do we feel we need this illusion of a consistent us? Is it really better to be stuck with it rather than lost without it? People are like that, 9 times out of 10 we’ll choose unhappiness over uncertainty.

Do you know that there’s no such thing as a funnel-cloud. Or at least there’s no cloud in there, just spinning, clear, wind. It looks like a cloud from far away because it’s all filled with dark dirt and debris. Like a whirlpool there’s isn’t really anything solid that makes a cyclone. They only have the illusion of being solid things, really they’re made up of always new; air, water, detritus, household-pets, slow children, or whatever they can snatch. Always new things spiraling in and out. Not even its shape the same as it dances and wriggles and bends itself into sometimes almost unrecognizable patterns. People are like this. For some reason we like to think of ourselves as consistent things, but that’s just another frumpy lie. This one tries to keep us living up to narrow and outdated definitions of ourselves. This lie doesn’t want us to know who we truly are.
Do you know who you are? Damn fucking right – you’re a Human Tornado.