Well this explains it: Mercury has been in apparent retrograde motion since August 23. No wonder my birthday was a big fucking shit-show, no wonder I still feel physically and mentally like crap, no wonder everything and everyone within my radius has turned into a massive monster cunt. (Yeah, this probably means you. Yes, you. Check the mirror – it’s fucking you.)

This bullshit is scheduled to continue until September 14 and I honestly don’t see myself making it to that date without some proverbial casualties. Fuck around and find out. Try it on me. Do it. I dare you. 

Wake. This. Beast.

{This joke of a post has been brought to you by Mercury in retrograde. A calmer explanation will hopefully follow. Or it won’t. Whatcha gonna do?}

One of the first foggy mornings arrived to signal the late-summer hour. I’d gone out to make a quick perambulation of the backyard and was standing beneath the seven sons flower tree, just beginning its sweet bloom, when I looked down at the pool and saw a shadow and reflection moving across the water. 

Well, the sky. 

It looked like a pheasant – namesake of the street on which we live, and a bird I’d never seen around here. The longer plumage fluttering behind it tipped me off, as did something extra about the head. Scrambling out from beneath the tree to gain a better look at something more than the reflection, I only saw that it had already disappeared from sight. I stood there in the morning fog, peering into the hazy sky and hoping it would come back, knowing that most birds won’t swoop back because they forgot something. 

My gaze returns to the reflections in the pool. When the water is still like this, early in the morning, it becomes like a pane of glass. Sometimes it helps to see a reflection of things to gain a better perspective of what they really are. Is a reflection any less real than what it’s reflecting? Touching the water, one can make it all disappear. More mental contortions for which I’m wholly unprepared, especially this early in the week. 

Suzie made me this glorious COVID-cake/birthday-bundt and it was delicious. I do love a good bundt. And if escaping COVID until this very moment is worthy of celebration, then let us have cake! This birthday week has been largely awful, and the less said about it the better. We have arrived at the final few days of August, and that merits celebration just so we can end it. On with the weekly recap, such as it was…

Things began with seeing and beeing.

Before too long, things got humming.

Then all too soon it was time for my birthday.

And a requisite birthday suit post.

Somehow, August remained enchanting.

Building a blog post.

Starting again.

The butterflies were back.

Tom Ford celebrated his birthday too.

Dazzlers of the Day included Margo Martindale, Taylor Zakhar Perez, and Nicholas Galitzine.

Now that our butterfly bush is in full bloom, a cavalcade of butterflies has been visiting our backyard, fluttering about from the cup plant to the butterfly weed to the Joe Pye Weed. The seven sons flower tree is on the verge of busting out in its now brilliant bloom – the latest flowers to appear in the summer season, almost after-thoughts since we’ve mentally put the garden to sleep weeks ago. At least I have. 

It was an earlier wrap-up, as much a sign of emotional defeat as it was exhaustion from trying to find a regular stretch of sunny weather that wasn’t interrupted by storms of some sort. It has not been a stable or safe summer, not in the least. 

Yet still the butterflies have arrived, and the hummingbirds and finches have been keeping us company as well, and on the morning this is being written, the sun is out and summer whispers that she is still here, that she never left, and that she will return again next year. 

A beautiful black butterfly, dusted with a bit of blue and dotted with a few brilliant spots of white, alights on a butterfly bush bloom. It poses for only a moment, then flits away in search of more nectar in other backyards. I watch it depart like a little friendly shadow. 

The immediate aftermath of a birthday – even the most uneventful and downplayed of birthdays – can feel strikingly quiet and still. The idea of starting another year on earth gets more daunting the older I get. Maybe I’m simply more tired after doing this for 47 years. Maybe birthdays seem less celebratory and more worrisome with each passing journey around the sun; the world has certainly not gotten any easier or more enjoyable, even if my perspective and coping has evolved and advanced. Maybe I’m slowly coming to realize that a birthday is simply another day, and that birth and death are not finite beginnings and endings, but rather a continuation of some greater arc of existence. The mind struggles with such an idea, barely able to wrap itself around the notion. That’s a sizable shift in the way I’ve viewed our place in the world, and how I’ve categorized things in my head. I want to have a better grasp on it, a more stable handle on what it all means, but I’m not there yet.

I fear I’m not even close. 

And so I pause, stepping into the summer light, studying the plants and flowers and leaves in the backyard, traversing the well-worn path I usually take, trying to find some new meaning, or some old meaning I may have missed in all these days and seasons and years. Approaching half a century of life on this earth, I allow myself an indulgent moment of weakness, a little bit of rest, especially as that long-ago feeling of wanting to sink down into the earth has been hinting at a return. It’s nothing I don’t think I can handle, but I want to be careful – that’s always when the universe doles out its vicious reminder that none of us are really in command, none of us are in control. 

It is at such times I try to remember to act like some long-stemmed water plant rooted at the bottom of a riverbed, my feet stuck and bound beneath smooth stones, my limbs flowing freely and undulating with the current. Letting go and floating freely, secure in my little foothold on this earth, yet allowing the flow of life to go around and through me. The waters make turn wild and icy, murky and muddy, clear and crystalline, warm and womb-like – and still I remain in place, allowing them to move over me, giving myself over to whatever the water may carry in passing. 

A day passes. A week passes. A year passes. Another birthday is done, another one may come. 

The birthday suits provided in this post are those of the naked-ass florals you see blooming and showing off below. All other male nudity will be found in the links provided throughout the following post. My naked body is not ready for its close-up, Mr. DeMille, and quite frankly I’m not in a particularly exhibitionist mood – save that for the fall when there’s a bite in the air. 

On this birthday, I rose for work early, but before signing on to the computer, before brewing a cup of tea, and before opening any birthday cards, I padded quietly out to the backyard and sat beside the garden. A hummingbird had caught my eye, bouncing about the salvia, and as I approached it flitted off to the nearby dogwood tree, where it perched and looked down at me, perhaps annoyingly wondering why I had disturbed its breakfast. I sat still and silently, hoping it would return, but eventually it flew away. 

After a while, a few finches alighted on the cup plant, my stillness indicating safety, my quiet indicating no overt threat. They chirped and set the bright yellow flowers swaying gently in the air. Higher overhead, a blue jay soared to the evergreens across the street, while a cardinal just barely its presence known with some rustling on the edge of the roof. 

And so begins my 48th year on earth – in stillness, on a shadowless and slightly-overcast morning, attended to by birds and flowers, and feeling the grounding pull of the earth beneath me. It is its own sort of meditation, a reverence and honoring of the land to which we will all one day return. Nearby, healthy bushes of rosemary and sage are ripe and ready for the harvest – they will become part of some white bean dip, or be boiled in butter lending flavor to a lovely piece of sea bass wrapped in prosciutto, and they will become part of me – the land offering its part of sustenance, and knowing that one day I will be back as part of the land, my body rotted out or burned to ashes and given once more to the earth, ready for the minerals and broken-down components of my physical being to become just another stage of the cycle. We are all a part of this great ensemble. On with previous birthday suit posts to lift the spirits…

Last year, I staged the traditional birthday suit post with some Boston boudoir shots that served to set #47 in naked motion. Later that night, this moody post was accompanied by all the skinny-dipping glory a proper birthday provides. It was a quieter affair, as these latter-day birthdays tend to inspire. 

In 2021, Lizzo provided the impetus to let my ass hang out in this birthday suit post. As many birthdays do, talk turned a bit more contemplative later on in the posting day. 

The first pandemic birthday suit post hit as I hit #45, and 2020’s celebration was as shitty as to be expected in such a time. Thank God for vintage birthday suit shots reminding me that we were all young once. 

A rather different birthday suit was worn in 2019, to many a reader’s delight and fury. That year we celebrated in Boston, which is, I think, the last time we were in Boston for a birthday. 

For 2017 and 2018, summer breaks from blogging meant no birthday posts went up, but in looking through the archives it appeared there was this summer skinny-dipping post in honor of nightswimming, so there you go. 

Turning to Chapter 41 in 2016, a 41st birthday-suited butt-boy post went something like this. (Along with some birthday suit mayhem for good measure.)

That brings us to the fabled 40th birthday of 2015, well, not so much fabled since the shit actually went down. On the eve before, a bit of Madonna’s ‘Rebel Heart’ set the scene for all the naked madness which was about to unfold. Hey, 40 calls for something magnificently awful, but I opted for a more meaningful few days in Boston with Andy. This dinner at Douzo was lovely, this secret garden was enchanting, this brunch was epic, this Judy Garland suite was grand, this trip under the sea was joyous, this booty peek was cheeky, this Tom Ford gift was fabulous, this birthday suit remains a favorite, this beauty is a reminder of the preferred state of solitude that 40 invoked, and this ending was a happy one. 

The year 2014 formed the last one of my 30’s, so we did it up in high NYC style. #39 felt like a purgatorial place, and purgatory is definitely how I feel about New York sometimes, but this trip went so well I’m surprised I haven’t returned for another one – maybe in 2024, ten years from when this fun adventure went down, we’ll come back. Until then, this birthday bubble bath for posteriority. 

Things were simpler a decade ago, as this birthday suit post from 2013 illustrates. It was the year we went to The Mount, Edith Warthon’s Berkshires retreat, a glorious place to spend a day of contemplation. The innermost rooms of the mind are best glimpsed from the vantage point of one’s birthday. The outermost rooms were pretty glorious too. And the flowers… all those glorious flowers.

For my 37th birthday in 2012, a magical trip to Provincetown began in fun and fine form. Boston was the jumping off point, with a dinner and a birthday menu and this shucked-up moment. Upon entering Provincetown, all the magic came flooding back. Another travesty is that we haven’t been back to this beauty since that trip. Part of the reason is that it went so swimmingly well I don’t know how we would ever match it again. A brush with the Edies alone made it indelibly memorable. We are due to return again.

2011 found me waxing nostalgic in this post, along with this memory of my childhood bestie. 

All the other birthday posts from the life of this blog, 2003 until 2010, have been excised in a rare moment of wisdom and ruthless editing. You’re so very welcome.