It's been a while since I last posted. Just no topics catching my eye or rambling around my noggin. However I just read a rather disheartening blog post from a man lamenting his own body issues but celebrating his own children's unabashed approach to being naked.  The writer, Jeremy, has made his home clothing optional as a way to raise his kids in a body-positive environment. But, as it turns out, Jeremy is the one with body issues not the kids. As a little boy - and by that definition anything up to the onset of puberty at 14 - I was pretty uninhibited. I've recounted nude swims at a friend's house and with the cub scouts at the scoutmaster's home. The time I fell in the pool at a different friend's house and spent the next forty or so minutes playing naked in his bedroom while his mother dried my clothes in the dryer. Swimming in rivers and ponds with the scouts. And I would guess a lot of adults have similar stories, or stories about their own kids being ...

An aspect of my continuing weight loss/fitness regimen is some building excitement for this upcoming Summer season. For the first time in decades I'll feel comfortable taking off my shirt at the beach or at pool parties. Oddly enough, even though I am comfortable being fully nude around other (consenting) people in private, that strangely doesn't translate to comfort being shirtless in public places. I'm sure that psychologists have an explanation or at least a term for it, but I have - had - a mental discomfort with being overweight and topless in public for decades based on poor health and body image. It's part of the ongoing psychological examination I'm still doing, despite the six decades of trying to understand who I am. That's the core purpose of this blog, of course, so hopefully it isn't too repetitive. This year has been particularly good as far as showing me that my self-esteem is based not on how I'm perceived by others, but how much I feel ...

 It probably would not surprise anyone who reads this blog that I have, over the years, dealt with more than a handful of body image issues, some of which were brought on by the very experiences that eventually led me to being pretty indifferent about nudity. I've mentioned before the fact that my body, particularly my left side inguinal area, has been the subject of much attention from the medical community. That dates from childhood, and as a young boy I was pretty self-conscious about one particular scar left over from a kidney operation. It runs from my back to just shy of my stomach, and once puberty set in it grew to be an eventual eight inches of pretty obvious scarring to anyone who sees me with my shirt off. Given that the surgery was conducted in the 1960s - before the advent of many modern surgical techniques - it's a pretty nasty looking affair. Later, a series of abdominal surgeries - three umbilical hernias (the belly button) - also left prominent scars on my nav...