Painting in the Nude

With no sex or art involved

Three days ago Winter finally ended here on the Great Plains of Turtle Island. (Finally!) But when Winter ends the next thing one expects is Spring. Such was not the case, however.

We went directly from Winter to Summer. Spring utterly failed to show up. It showed up for rehearsal but when the curtain rose it was nowhere to be found. It ran out the back door.

According to the weather experts — and who doesn’t believe them? — our high temperature today was 85 degrees (Fahrenheit). Four days ago our high was 47 degrees. Collectively, the humans living in my neck of the woods went from wearing long pants to short pants in what seemed like a millisecond. Profoundly pale white legs were suddenly everywhere!

When I came home from work this evening and entered my little apartment it felt like I was walking into a sauna. I checked both of the thermometers in my apartment and they both read 87 degrees. For me, that is 19 degrees ABOVE room temperature!

I took off my shoes and socks and then my work clothes. I was about to put on some sweatpants and a t-shirt (house clothes) when I thought to myself, “Nope! That’s not going to cut it!” So I remained naked — the way God intended us to be.

I turned on a fan and I thought about turning on the air conditioner but I was just not ready to face an inflated electric bill. It had been months since I last turned on the air conditioner — and paid a humongous electric bill. While I fantasized about having my own home with solar panels, I decided to simply remain naked.

Totally naked.

(I live in a second-floor apartment so no one can see me running around my apartment naked unless they are on the very top of a large ladder.)

As I have stated in some of my previous posts, I have been building. I have been buying lumber and I have been measuring and sawing and hammering and screwing and painting. For the last couple of weeks I have been, Mr. Construction Guy.

I have done a lot of painting over the many decades of my life but, sadly, none of that painting has been done on a freaking canvas. My painting has always been on walls and ceilings and window wells and doors and door jams and book shelves and furniture and…. I even worked as a professional painter for a couple of months. It was one of the ten thousand jobs I’ve had in my life.

I found it outrageously boring. There was little to no creativity involved. It was profoundly mindless, menial grunt work. And it didn’t pay all that well.

But that is the kind of painting I needed for what I had been building. I had finished three units and had painted two of them. I needed to paint the other one.

As I walked home from work there were two options playing themselves out in my noggin. Once I got home I could blow off the painting and get online and write a post on Medium. I have been negligent in that regard lately. The other option was to paint that last unit and be done with painting for a little while.

My noggin was completely vacuous as to something to write about so I chose painting that last unit and being done with it. But there was a wrench thrown into the equation!

It was my sudden nudity!

So there I was painting that third unit completely naked when I suddenly realized that I had never painted in the nude before! I went through all the mind tapes of my history and I could not come up with a single time I had ever painted in the nude!

I have to say that I got a little bit excited. Have you ever painted in the nude before? It may have been more exciting if I had been painting some piece of art on a canvas but I was just painting the third unit. There was no way I would join the ranks of Cezanne or any of those painters whose paintings fetch millions of dollars. (I wondered if any of them had painted in the nude.)

But it sure felt good doing it in the nude! Seriously, it was a lot more exciting than I thought it would be. Why had I never done it before?

Like I said, I have done a lot of painting in my life. Once, back when I was living in Colorado, I had moved into a tiny dilapidated two-bedroom house. I decided to turn the small second bedroom into an office. It had the perfect configuration of windows and just enough space for a desk looking out those windows.

But that room was painted pink. And apparently, it was painted pink decades ago. It was not a vibrant pink but rather a pink that was dull and dirty. I imagined the room had served as a bedroom to a little girl or two little girls sometime in the distant past. There was a dull history to the room but I wanted to make it my own. I wanted to make it an office where I could write.

I decided to paint the room white — a delightfully neutral color and one of my favorite colors. I had painted about half the room white when I came home from work one day and was compelled to finish painting the room white. I desperately needed an office.

Well, I was so eager to finish painting that room that I never changed clothes from what I wore to work that day. I just had to get rid of that freaking pink! I had to finish painting that room!

After finishing painting that room I was so happy until I realized that there was white paint splattered all over my clothes! I was wearing a delightfully gray shirt that I had just bought a month before. (I wear a lot of neutral colors.) It was splattered with white paint! It was ruined! What the hell was I thinking painting in my work clothes?

So tonight I painted that third unit completely naked. Yes, it was hot and I was sweating and, yes, it was truly fun. As I did so, I realized that this was something that I had never done before in my long life. This got me so excited! I was doing something that I had never done before! I’ve done a lot of things in my life and I was starting to think that there was not much left that I had yet to do.

And the thought of doing something completely new made me very happy. Doing something new can be such an inspiration. I was happier than I’ve been in days.

And then I realized something else and it made me laugh out loud…

…I realized that I was not ruining any of my clothes!

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