Sometimes I can't believe it's been seven years since I lived alone.  One thing I'm looking forward to when I move into my place in September is wanton nudity.  Not only my own, but friends, lovers, whoever.

Honestly, though. It's been a long time since I've been wantonly naked in my own home (granted, a pastime which is not without its risks**).  Since I've been here, with Jake, I've kept my trousers on about the apartment, although my various paramours have run the gamut from too painfully shy to leave the bedroom if anyone else is home to fuck him, it's not like he's never seen a grown man naked totally gratuitous post-coital victory laps around the flat. 

Despite the relative frequency of the latter, there have not been any run-ins with the roommate, I'm relieved to say.

Because I'm really not an exhibitionist.  I don't not wear clothes so that others will see me naked.  But, I'm also not going to wear them just so I won't see myself naked, either.  I am a pragmatic nudist.  Not one of these weirdos who rides horses and plays tennis in the buff, his junk getting all banged up.

Like, I prefer not to use AC in the summertime. So when it's hot, I go starkers around the house.  Again, not with Jake around.  And not with Yin and Yang, the Siamese couple who will be moving into the Fauntleroy Suite in a couple of weeks, either.  I have no desire to be remembered as the creepy naked roommate.  I'm good with creepy.  It's enough.  I mean, naked takes it to a whole nother level. 

Truth is, I don't even leave my room in my tighty whities (and yes, I am most definitely a briefs guy — boxers might as well be freeballing), because I don't want to be known as the creepy roommate in the tighty whities, either.  I have a pair of perfectly respectable plaid pajama bottoms hanging on the back of my door which I only wear for show (how on earth anyone actually sleeps in PJs I'll never know), and that's what I wear if I have to leave my room once I've settled in.  I mean, who's ever heard of a creepy roommate... in pajamas?  Think about it.

I remember one very steamy summer with my French lover B. — this was back in the late '90s — it seemed we spent the whole summer in his flat naked.  Drinking, smoking, fucking, napping.  Oh, and crying.  He was that type.  The crying type.  He cried a lot, about every little thing.  It wasn't sad crying — it was sentimental.  He was sentimental.  He loved everything so much and life was so beautiful it made him cry.  Like, every day.  Of course, we cried together quite a bit.  Some lovers that's how it goes.  When in Rome, I say.

I was a little relieved when it was over, though, I have to admit.  Cathartic and all, but it takes it out of you after awhile, dunnit?

I was madly in love with a Hungarian at the time, a young Doctor named Tibor who lived in a town called Pécs, in the South.  Not really the crying type.  Mischievous, whipsmart but with animal reflexes, and built like a brick shithouse (as my father used to say, usually in reference to Raquel Welch), he was pretty much my masculine ideal, right down to the smell of him.

He was a grrrreat shag, too.  Needless to say.  But my favorite part was after all that, in the calm of the post-coital (or intercoital, as the case may be) period.  Naked and spent, I would watch him, in no rush to get dressed himself, saunter to the bedroom window, lean out, and have a smoke, or sit at my desk, or in the armchair in the corner checking his phone messages, sometimes returning calls. 

Doing normal things, in other words, only naked.

But what an extraordinary feeling of intimacy, seeing him like this, perfectly relaxed, going about his business as if he weren't the most gorgeous thing alive right then. This was not the agitated nudity of sexual display, but the unselfconscious body at ease — at ease with itself and its surroundings.  Languid.  Sated. 

So brief — and uncommon — is the moment of true satiation (for men, if they don't fall fast asleep right away, it lasts about seven minutes), to share that with someone is every bit as intimate as sex itself (luckily, you have to have sex first to get there — it's a twofer).

Ah, Tibi.  My Tibi.

Anyway, today is that kind of day.  I was out in the garden early, to beat the heat, and came back mid-morning, already hot and sweaty, stripped and showered, and frankly just didn't feel like dressing again (until going out later, that is).  But Jake has a habit of showing up at the most inopportune times, nowadays with The Britney in tow.  That's a shit-show.  Her voice is Fran Drescher doing Tickle-Me Elmo.  You think nails on a blackboard's bad.  

But I did have a sort of naked lunch, in the Jamie Oliver sense of it.  I eat a lot of raw veggies (and stir-fried veggies, of course, ever since I got my beautiful wok), but as Friends of the Blog know I'm contemplating going full-vegetarian for a week.  Some day.  I'm just doing dry runs at the moment. 

I got a block of extra firm tofu at Whole Foods yesterday, but also picked up a couple of free-range chicken thighs just in case.  It's been years since I tried tofu, and I was sure they'd found some space-age way to make it more palatable.  It's always been the texture I've found skeevy.

Unfortunately, I still do.  So, that's a problem. 

But I have a feeling if I had a naked chef of my own, I could deal with a vegetarian diet.  I might be able to give up beef if I could substitute beefcake. 

Try-outs start September 1 in the new digs.
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*I always toss 'em back.  I'm an ethical angler, after all.
**He won his appeal, by the way.