Let’s Talk About Nxde

What I miss most about the hot springs of Japan and Taiwan was the social permission to be nude in semi-public without turning it into a major affair.

Some spas in San Francisco have public baths which allow nudity, but they are more expensive, and it’s dressed up as a special treat, rather than someone you can do as casually as visiting a restaurant. Spas are supposed to help you relax, and in a way they do, but… I felt I could let myself go a bit more at hot springs in East Asia.

I’ve also been to a hot spring in California which permits nudity. I only exposed my legs. For some reason, in that culture, I felt less comfortable exposing myself. It wasn’t that there were men there—I’ve been to mixed-gender hot springs in Japan and gone nude. Shared etiquette and staff govern Japanese onsen. That California wild hot spring had no staff, and I didn’t know what the locals’ established rules were.

Sometimes, in my dreams, I go walking in the street half-nude and don’t realize it until I’m far from home. What do those dreams mean? Your guess is as good as mine.

I need to know that others around me will accept my nudity and that we all share rules which protect us all. When I feel that safe, it’s freeing to not need clothes around other people.

That brings us to (G)I-DLE’s new song, “Nxde.”

We Live Through Dark Times, Until We Die

I recommend reading this entire thread by Alisa Lynn Lynn Valdés about SARS2 on Twitter.

The mechanism of SARS2? Endothelial damage. In plain English? Covid-19 fucks up the lining of your blood vessels. All 60,000 miles of it. Blood vessels lack nerves. You feel OK as it eats your arteries. Doesn't mean it's "mild." It means the endothelium isn't innervated.

— 📖NY Times Bestselling Author Alisa Lynn Valdés 🖋 (@AlisaValdesRod1) October 19, 2022

These are the two tweets I’m replying to:

I knew the collective delusions before. Lived with the marginalizations and dehumanizations every day. The lack of equity. Not fun. But I could live with that. I can't live with this. How do I avoid the air of this shared atmosphere? How do I avoid the breath of fools?

— 📖NY Times Bestselling Author Alisa Lynn Valdés 🖋 (@AlisaValdesRod1) October 19, 2022

This reminds me of Marla Rose’s essay “On Accountability, Reckoning with Indifference and Using Shame as a Tactic.” Since that’s behind a paywall, I’ll summarize the main point: the mass indifference to the covid pandemic doesn’t surprise vegans because we’re used to mass indifference. To quote Marla Rose:

Vegans could have predicted that there would be some people who wouldn’t care about containing this virus. Why? Because we have been trying to get people to give a shit about other species and our planet for years and we have been largely mocked, ignored and dismissed.

We have shown the public the statistics on the direct links from animal agribusiness to irrevocable climate change, massive water waste and pollution, clearcutting the rainforests and more and we have been told “It’s my personal choice to eat meat” as if one’s fleeting dietary choice is the greater good against the crushing weight of all that irreversible harm.

I’ve been vegan since 2008, so I have a lot of experience with discussing these matters with evidence and logic while the non-vegans resort to bad, illogical arguments because they simply don’t care. I have experience of living among people with moral principles different from mine. So far, I have lived through that.

We Live in the Aquarium We Make

We live like fish in an aquarium. Food comes mysteriously down, oxygen bubbles up.

Laurence Gonzales, Deep Survival

Few humans can live without changing their environments.

I once visited some caves in a tropical area which had evidence of pre-historic human residents. Maybe those people didn’t need to build shelter. Since it was on the coast with plenty of tropical trees nearby, they could get fish, fruit, and tubers easily—but surely they needed some tools. In the coldest weather, they must’ve needed clothes too.

There aren’t enough locations like that for the overwhelming majority of humans alive today to survive.

Old Clothes, Still In Use

I have two T-shirts which I’ve had since elementary school which I still wear often. (My T-shirt size has not changed since I was 10 years old).

Well, one t-shirt is currently in my mend pile. I’ve started the mending… which reveals that this shirt needs even more mending than I thought.

It doesn’t make financial sense to mend a cotton t-shirt when I could get another cotton T-shirt cheap. (Heck, I could probably persuade someone to give me a spare cotton T-shirt for free).

But it wouldn’t be this T-shirt. This is one of my favorites.