According to Wiki-freaking-pedia, today is World Naked Gardening Day, which is hilariously described as “an annual international event generally celebrated on the first Saturday of May by gardeners and non-gardeners alike.” As a gardener, I’m all for celebrating gardening events, though I will say that gardening while naked is foolish at best, and quite dangerous at worst. But as the past has proven, it’s not that perilous to take a few photos pretending, and this is the sort of harmless quasi-holiday that deserves more celebration. Particularly in a time when staying home is the new going out.
The post-shower towel shot serves several purposes. First and foremost is the clickbait aspect that typically gains more viewers when anyone takes their clothes off. Second, there is the bait and switch aspect for which this site should be better known. A post fronted by gratuitous nudity that ends up being about meditation and mindfulness is one of those twists that keep me interested in this nineteen-year-old website. Third, taking a shower is a mundane everyday moment that is ripe for mindfulness, so these photos go along with that idea, and give me a chance to expound upon a beginning practice in meditation and mindfulness, which some friends and family have asked about.
I’ve been making my way through Matthew Sockolov’s ‘Practicing Mindfulness’ book, a collection of ’75 Essential Meditations to Reduce Stress, Improve Mental Health, and Find Peace in the Everyday.’ The most recent meditation I tried is ideal for anyone looking to begin a meditation practice, and I wish I’d happened upon it sooner in my journey. It’s about resting the mind, which seems to be the most difficult part of meditation for almost everyone I’ve talked to about this.
Sockolov recommends this easy ten-minute practice as a way to calm the thoughts that invariably creep into our heads as soon as we stop moving and sit still. In today’s world where information and distractions are thrown at us non-stop from the moment we wake to the moment we fall asleep with our phones in our hands, still mindlessly scrolling like automatons, this is especially challenging to do. We are conditioned to be in a state of constant stimulation, and that is wreaking havoc on multiple levels. The best and easiest way to break this cycle, and the addiction of the phone, is to step away from it, and insist on carving out time and space for simply sitting still in silence. Not the most comfortable place for anyone to be anymore, but if you give it a chance you may find the rest of your life begins to calm down too. It worked for me.
Begin by finding the time and place to do this. If you are one who worries about time (like my Virgo self), set a phone alarm for five or ten minutes so you’re not constantly looking at the minutes passing by. Find a quiet place of solitude, even if it’s just a bathroom to escape. Ideally you have somewhere better to go where you can be comfortable. The practice is to sit or lie down and begin deep breathing. One slow breath in and one slow breath out. Then again. And again.
Once you are doing this, you will find a number of thoughts start creeping into your head. What you are making for dinner, what time you need to pick the kids up from practice, what you need to get from the store, what outfit to wear for next weekend’s get-together, who you need to call back, who you don’t want to text back – a myriad of life’s nonsense will suddenly impede on this moment, and that’s ok. Allow the thoughts to come, acknowledge them, and let them pass by. Eventually they will stop. If they don’t, it’s good to find something else to focus on to maintain the quiet posture. Sockolov advises on holding a couple of phrases in your head:
May my mind be at ease.
May I be at ease with my mind.
On each slow inhale, you can focus on the mantra ‘May my mind be at ease’ and on each slow exhale repeat it again ‘May my mind be at ease.’ On the next inhale think of the next one ‘May I be at ease with my mind’ and doing the same on the exhale. It provides a basic framework and focus that may help in pushing other thoughts from the mind, and achieving that divine blank space in your head is the purpose here. When worrisome thoughts are eradicated, it’s difficult to worry. This magic is something I wish I had discovered earlier, because it bleeds into the rest of life.
If you can manage five to ten minutes of this each day, you will find it easy to increase by a minute or two until you’re getting in a good fifteen to twenty minutes of meditation, and that’s when things get even better. It allows you to be more fully present, and leads into the practice of mindfulness, inhabiting the most mundane moments of the day, such as a simple shower, or the act of getting dressed. These things are typically rushed and blown through without thought, other than worrying about what comes next. By being present to the task at hand, you may find a joy in the process itself, and focusing on each step of a task is another way of pushing worrisome thoughts from your headspace.
{Naked selfies not required in a shower situation; I’m only here to illustrate and illuminate.}
Listen, I didn’t make this up. It’s Feast of the Ass Day, some religious commemoration that takes place on January 14, to mark donkey shit or something – not literal shit, I mean that as donkey stuff. It’s religious, I swear. See here. At one point the Catholic Church condemned the celebration, so I’m all for it. Feast on, my assified friends!
In these parts, and on this website, Feast of the Ass means something wholly different. I won’t get into specifics, but you get my drift, you get my notion, you get my causing a commotion. At such a time, and in such a world, let us celebrate the Feast of the Ass in our own special way, delighting in its pagan leanings, finding joy in its absurd silliness, and remembering how nonsensical humans have always been. We can try to make order and sense out of things by playing with religion, but in the end we’re all just a little bit mad, and I’m so happy it should be so.
As someone who loves writing, I usually like to tell a story or ten behind the photos I post here. On this day, I’m going to let other more capable artists tell hints of what inspired these pictures, while letting the pictures speak for themselves, no matter what they might say.
“A funny person is funny only for so long, but a wit can sit down and go on being spellbinding forever. One is not meant to laugh. One stays quiet and marvels. Spontaneously witty talk is without question the most fascinating entertainment there is.” ~ Diana Vreeland
“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.” ~ Oscar Wilde
“Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death–ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible for life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.” ~ James Baldwin
“I just feel like we as a human race tend to fear that which we don’t understand. It’s cause for a lot of bad things and bad behavior to exist on the planet. Artists have a way of touching people and changing minds in a way that sometimes other mediums don’t.” ~ Billy Porter
“The letter, written in absorbed solitude, is an act of faith: it assumes the presence of humanity: world and self are generated from within: loneliness is courted, not feared. To write a letter is to be alone with my thoughts in the conjured presence of another person. I keep myself imaginative company. I occupy the empty room.” ~ Vivian Gornick
“History isn’t something you look back at and say it was inevitable, it happens because people make decisions that are sometimes very impulsive and of the moment, but those moments are cumulative realities.” ~ Marsha P. Johnson
“Some people are born in the mountains, while others are born by the sea. Some people are happy to live in the place they were born, while others must make a journey to reach the climate in which they can flourish and grow. Between the ocean and the mountains is a wild forest. That is where I want to make my home.” ~ Maia Kobabe
This is admittedly a bit of a click-bait-and-switch post, because some people only enter here with the titillating possibility of gratuitous nudity. There is never judgment about such intentions – a click is a click is a click – and clicks actually don’t mean anything on this profit-free non-monetized website. Yet as I approach the latter half of my forties (well, not so much approach as exist within it) I find the desire to share some practices that make life better the older I get, and one of the main ones is deliberately making the effort to maintain a degree of mindfulness at all times.
We rush and we work and we go through the motions of any given weekday with the express intent of simply getting through it, getting on with it, getting it out of the way so we can enjoy the weekend – and then we never quite make of it what we wanted to make of it. Even those weekends that do turn into something magical and memorable, are quickly forgotten within the first few moments of Monday morning mayhem, erased instantly as if they never even happened at all. How do we capture that and make Monday more like Sunday, and Tuesday more like Saturday? For me it’s in finding the little joys of mindfulness, and taking breaks and pauses to reconnect to the peace and silence that meditation can conjure.
Does that mean stopping your work day and heading to the nearest spa for an extended massage on your lunch hour? No – though I wish. That’s not really practical or possible for most of us. But can we pause in our day to do some deep breathing, to get away from the desk and take a walk, to simply stand up and step outside for a moment to find whatever joy is at hand and in the air? Absolutely. It’s about being mindful and slowing down the racing thoughts that too often occupy our mind when we could and should be focused on being as present as possible.
It begins with the very start of the day, in the otherwise-mundane motions of a shower. After 46 years, I’ve pretty much mastered the seven-minute shower, and for most of those years it always felt like a race – against the clock and against the cacophony of thoughts running through my head as the day began. In what should have been a peaceful and calm entry into the day was usually a rushed and jumbled mental marathon that left me spent by the time I turned the water off and started toweling off. The shower was efficient and effective in getting me cleaned and waking me up, yet it did little to set my mind at ease.
When I started reading up on mindfulness, the morning shower seemed the most basic place to begin. I slowed down my thoughts by focusing only on the present moment – the water, the heat, the soap, the scent – and all of the sensual aspects of a shower were enough to quell the bustling freight train of worries that would usually be barreling through my head. If done with enough concentration, it worked quite well, and eventually the concentration required became more habit than concerted effort, which is when mindfulness really takes off and starts bleeding helpfully into other areas of life.
It doesn’t happen with every shower. Some days you just have to get in and out to make it into the office on time, and you have to tick through the duties of the day just so you won’t forget something. But for the most part, my mornings are more peaceful, and the rest of the day more energized, when I practice such mindfulness.
THEY SAY I SHOULD WATCH THE SHIT I POST, OH GODDAMN
SAY I’M TURNING BIG GIRLS INTO HOES, OH GODDAMN
THEY SAY I GET GROUPIES AT MY SHOWS, OH GODDAMN
As I quickly approach whatever unplanned birthday shenanigans may come to pass, it seems only fitting to celebrate in my birthday suit, which I’ve largely neglected to do in recent months just because it’s been done to death. The categories for ‘Male Nudity’ and ‘Gratuitous Male Nudity’ come with a long list of accompanying posts and links – proof that an examination of the physical body in all its unadorned fashion has proven as ubiquitous as flowers or Madonna in these parts. During the last couple of years, however, my interests have careened to other places and poses, changing the overall arc of this site, but every now and then a song calls for some sort of exhibitionist celebration, and rather than retreat into the shyness that social isolation has only emboldened, I’m challenging my online self to return to the glory that once provided so much clickbait.
SPENDING ALL YOUR TIME TRYNA BREAK A WOMAN DOWN
REALER SHIT IS GOIN’ ON BABY, TAKE A LOOK AROUND
IF YOU THAT THAT I WAS RATCHET WITH MY ASS HANGIN’ OUT
JUST WAIT UNTIL THE SUMMER WHEN THEY LET ME OUT THE HOUSE, BITCH
The last couple of years have seen the aforementioned turn for this blog, something that can only be appreciated and understood more fully and accurately with the benefits of hindsight and time. The way a person changes and evolves, the shifts and gradual gradations of movement a person makes – these are slow and incremental, often going unnoticed on a day-to-day level, and only more fully fathomed when months and years begin to pass and a bigger picture is revealed. This is one of those moments when I see how many corners this site has rounded, how vastly different it is from just a few years ago. The good thing is that I’m generally happier with the way things are, more fully confident and genuinely secure in the person I’ve become. It’s not something that can be completely taught, and it’s not something that can be accomplished with the help of anyone else. The essential nature of such growth is based on an autonomy of existence – from there, and only from there, can one invite anyone else into their world.
(TALKIN’, TALKIN’, TALKIN)
GIVE ‘EM SOMETHING TO TALK ABOUT
SICK OF RUMORS, BUT HATERS DO WHAT THEY DO
HATERS DO WHAT THEY DO
Meanwhile, people are left to conjecture and whisper, sit and spin, and the rumors and the water will swirl about, encircling and clouding the proceedings if one lets all that stuff become anything more than what they are. My teenage self consistently reveled in the rumors – both in starting and being the topic of them – more often than not at any expense. Anything to enliven the doldrums of an adolescence in Amsterdam, New York. Anything to brighten up a summer. If I had to be the subject to add some drama to the stultifying non-events of our upstate New York world, so be it. “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.” You know the routine. Was it right or wrong? I don’t think it’s possible to say. The answers to all of life’s questions are rarely so clear-cut. Sometimes the mere rearing of a question is an end unto itself, the very symbol of a question mark a curvy symbol of nothing more or nothing less than possibility.
ALL THE RUMORS ARE TRUE, YEAH
FAKE ASS, FAKE BOOBS, YEAH
Y’ALL BE RUNNIN’ WITH FAKE NEWS, YEAH
CARDI AIN’T POPPIN’, NO, THAT’S A MACHINE (HUH?)
NOBODY LISTEN, THEY BUYIN’ THEM STREAMS
THEY EVEN POST IT ON BLOGS OVERSEAS
AND LIE IN A LANGUAGE I CAN’T EVEN READ
THE FUCK DO THIS MEAN?
Doffing clothing and diving into the warm water of a pool is about as innocent and scandalous as summer gets these days. So much of hype and hoopla and controversy lives solely in the heads and minds of those of us with nothing better to do. I’ve jumped into that wet and messy quagmire, and for quite some time got quite a bit of enjoyment and entertainment out of it. Now I’m just looking for something closer to peace.
But before we go all ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ here, there’s still room for some butt-baring, ass-shaking, booty-bombing extra-ness, the kind of show that once dominated this silly site in ways that now feel more quaint and innocuous than they ever did before. Perhaps the rest of the world finally caught up with my antics, degrading its prim and proper stance and sullying itself in the sort of primal urges that supposedly made sex and nudity such dirty concepts in the first place.
LOOK, I’M A BRONX BITCH WITH SOME POP HITS
USED TO POP OFF WHEN THEY POP SHIT
BUT I’M CALMED DOWN AND I’M LOCKED IN
AND MY RECORDS LIVE IN THE TOP TEN
LIZZO, TEACH ME ABOUT BIG GIRL COOCHIE
LAST TIME I GOT FREAKY THE FCC SUED ME
BUT I’MA KEEP DOIN’ WHAT I WANNA DO
‘CAUSE ALL RUMORS ARE TRUE, YEAH
And so, we celebrate the body in all its wondrous forms and manifestations. We celebrate creativity and self-expression in all of their messy and mistake-laden turns. We celebrate the love and the kindness and the fun that make living in this world halfway bearable. Far too often, I’ve lost sight of that, allowing myself to be pulled down into the whirlpools of self-doubt and nagging insecurity, into the dim hollowed-out places where the echoes of vicious whispers are given life only through my own imaginings. We are our own worst enemies, when there are real ones enough out there, ready to believe the worst they can conjure about you – especially when it’s never really about you in the first place. I fell prey to such projection in the past, but no more.
On the verge of another birthday – my 46th if you can wrap your head around such a round juicy number – I slip into my birthday suit, dive into the water, make a splash, and laugh hysterically when I break the surface.
WHY YOU SPENDING ALL YOUR TIME TRYNA BREAK A WOMAN DOWN
REALER SHIT IS GOIN’ ON BABY, TAKE A LOOK AROUND
IF YOU THAT THAT I WAS RATCHET WITH MY ASS HANGIN’ OUT
JUST WAIT UNTIL THE SUMMER WHEN THEY LET ME OUT THE HOUSE, BITCH
“Those bitter sorrows of childhood!– when sorrow is all new and strange, when hope has not yet got wings to fly beyond the days and weeks, and the space from summer to summer seems measureless.” ~George Eliot
Summer is like childhood in so many ways. It holds its innocence ever so briefly, cashing in on its wonder before it realizes its worth. It is temperamental yet resilient, stalwart yet delicate. It can begin and end in fiery fashion, or enter and leave in peaceful calm; every childhood is different, every summer is different. And always – always – it is gone too soon.
It feels like we’ve already said goodbye to this summer. Maybe we never really finished the mourning of spring. In truth, it almost seems like I’ve been in mourning since last autumn, when things had to fall completely apart before rebuilding into something better. It was a lot of work, and it remains a lot of work, but it is work I have grown to love – work I’ve always loved but never quite realized as love. “It gives me purpose, gives me voice… to say to the world… this is why I live…”
And so our summer draws to its close. It’s something we will never get back, no matter how much I attempt to pin it down here, no matter how many words I put together to keep it intact. Summer, in its everlasting elusiveness, slips away unscathed, while we are left with the scars and the sunburn, and even they will fade until we no longer remember what it was like to swim in the night and not feel a chill.
“I think it is unnatural to think that there is such a thing as a blue-sky, white-clouded happy childhood for anybody. Childhood is a very, very tricky business of surviving it. Because if one thing goes wrong or anything goes wrong, and usually something goes wrong, then you are compromised as a human being. You’re going to trip over that for a good part of your life.” ~Maurice Sendak
“Maybe we look into mirrors not merely to seek beauty, regardless how illusive, but to make sure, despite the facts, that we are still here. That the hunted body we move in has not yet been annihilated, scraped out. To see yourself still yourself is a refuge men who have not been denied cannot know.” ~ Ocean Vuong, ‘On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous’
“I read that beauty has historically demanded replication. We make more of anything we find aesthetically pleasing, whether it’s a vase, a painting, a chalice, a poem. We reproduce it in order to keep it, extend it through space and time. To gaze at what pleases – a fresco, a peach-red mountain range, a boy, the mole on his jaw – is, in itself, replication – the image prolonged in the eye, making more of it, making it last. Staring into the mirror, I replicate myself into a future where I might not exist.” – Ocean Vuong, ‘On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous’
Nicholas Hoult has been a Hunk of the Day here previously, back when we had Hunks of the Day, and if he keeps shaking his ass in posts like this he will likely be crowned again. Talk about The Great. Well, don’t talk, let the pics speak for themselves. See a little more of Mr. Hoult here.
Those nit-picky Catholics call this Ash Wednesday, but I prefer the racier spin on it. It gives us the opportunity to celebrate the booty, to toot the tush, to acknowledge the ass. We’ve done this sort of clickbait before (see this Ass Wednesday post or this one, and if you still want more see this one).
Bringing up the rear as only he can, Pietro Boselli has too many previous appearances to list here. Do yourself a favor and search his name in the search box at the bottom left of the page. Happy Ass Wednesday everybody! Let the Lenten games begin!
The book that is seeing me through the end of the summer is a delightfully decadent Italian romp that melds fact and fiction from the life and times of Tennessee Williams. ‘Leading Men’ by Christopher Castellani weaves real and imagined yarns of the writer’s life, and the circle of lovers and friends around him, while touching on the changing social structure of gay life then and now. It’s an entertaining read, but goes deeper too – a treatise on how we age, what becomes of our youth, and how we face – or don’t face – the passing days. I like a summer book that acknowledges and explores the darkness while putting on a glittering facade. Coupled with a few photos from my summer pool days of 2019, here are a few favorite quotes from the book, because Mr. Castellani is better with words than me.
Perhaps these were the two types of men in the world: those who kept trying to save you, and those who would forever test you. ~ from ‘Leading Men’ by Christopher Castellani
To be a romantic was to be seduced as easily by a beautiful boy as by a room full of jowly stonemasons passing around jugs of cheap chianti. ~ from ‘Leading Men’ by Christopher Castellani
By now, he was used to it all. And to be used to someone, to settle into his moods and demands and affections, wasn’t that something? Wasn’t that the best you could hope for, even when sometimes what you wanted most of all was to make love on a boulder for an audience of strangers, and to come back to the boulder every night at sunset to find that same man waiting there? Wasn’t that, possibly, everything? ~ from ‘Leading Men’ by Christopher Castellani
He came for someone else, but I was the one he chose. They are different things: being loved and being chosen. Being chosen is the more powerful drug. It enslaves you. And what you miss when it ends is not the man who did the choosing, but that rush of having been seen by him, and then plucked from the weeds, and then gathered up and hoarded and, yes, owned by him. These desires are out of fashion, but that does not make them any less true. I am sorry to be speaking in generalities. I am not trying to be elliptical. I am trying to tell you, in case you do not already know, that you will be loved by many men but chosen by only a few, and that knowing the difference will save you from making a fool of yourself. ~ from ‘Leading Men’ by Christopher Castellani
When Facebook sucks (as it has for the past three years) and Twitter gets too politically-abrasive (thanks to people like me), I turn to Instagram, where things are carefree, light, and occasionally naked. Those are the shots that populate my Top Nine of 2018, because people are still thirsty and these days I’ve got extra junk in my trunk to give away for free. There’s also my YouTube account, which I thought I was going to get into but was way wrong because I just can’t be bothered.
Such is the tattered state of my social media world as the year reaches its close. Largely bored by it all, I’ll admit to coasting a bit of late. To counteract that, I’ll be searching out inspiration and working on a new project which will hopefully result in some images to kickstart my Instagram world. Until then, enjoy all the nudity posted in the last year.
In honor of this spring holiday, when the big JC got one of the most infamous rises of them all, I’m going full-frontal on your ass and giving you the treat that has long been in the teasing: the full-frontal cock shot that so many have been clamoring for since the inception of this website over 15 years ago. Before my big reveal, however, a few other gents and their cock rockets.
First up, an Angel ~ Ashley Parker-Angel to be more specific. Talk about satisfying, Mr. Angel Parker’s Instagram is fodder for all sorts of thirst, as evidenced with the VPL (Visible Penis Line) shot seen here. It’s just a matter of time before he goes proper full-monty. Until then, the barely-veiled hints will have to suffice.
The aforementioned Visible Penis Line rears it’s anything-but-ugly head in the stunning physique and photo of Simon Dunn. Where do we even begin with Mr. Dunn? Start with this link, then go to this one, and finish off here. Then search the archives if you want even more. (Type anything into the ‘Search’ button at the bottom of each page, or pick a month in the actual ‘Archives’ button also found below.)
Booty-baring antics are apparently common-place on ‘Game of Thrones’ and Kit Harington got his out last season, I believe. I haven’t seen it yet because I’m still debating whether to watch the series from the beginning. In the meantime, a Harington booty pic and GIF.
The aforementioned Visible Penis Line rears it’s anything-but-ugly head in the stunning physique and photo of 
