Nothing Tops Men’s Pond Changing Room
Anarcho-nudism on Hampstead Heath
After I finally convinced a gatekeeper to let me in, I entered a men’s pond changing room. I looked to the right and saw a guy hanging on a pull-up bar. He was fully waxed from his yellow swimming trunks upwards, but at the same time, he had outrageously hairy legs, dense like Mikel Arteta’s haircut. He was in his late thirties and he was Indian.
Hampstead Heath ponds are known as Londoners’ favourite place to cool down during warm summer days. The UK was facing a heatwave so the place was busy. Some guys were warming up for a swim, some were doing yoga and some reading the newspaper. Now, as I was in, I was looking for a place to spread out my towel.
“Fiiiive,” the Indian guy screamed in pain as he pulled himself up one more time.
He kept hanging on the pull bar.
I turned towards the showers and saw a group of mature, naked men lying and sunbathing.
“Nudists,” I exclaimed. “Nudism is anarchism!”
So I spread out my towel and joined them. A gay man with a big belly covered with a one-piece swimsuit was entertaining nudists. He had a pink scarf which he used to disguise in different characters. He made a bun and acted like an angry housewife. He stamped on my towel during the performance.
“Hah, how strange… I am in,” I thought as I stretched out and let the sun spill all over my body.
I didn’t expect I would get in here in the first place when the gatekeeper told me the place was fully booked and that I should have had to book it online.
“What do you mean, fully booked?” I asked him.
Of course, I knew I had needed to book a ticket online. Everything needs to be booked online in these tight times. But could I have been bothered to do it?
Of course not.
Let’s put it this way. That was a spring-fed pond that I was trying to enter. It is mine equally as it is the gatekeeper’s and even his boss’s who owns the license to use the pond. Why would I need to book online something that is here by nature’s will and was meant to be here for everybody, and not only for those who have money to pay?
It is a fucking pond. And I am not James Bond.
What? They decided to put a fence around it, install a creepy changing room, and charge the entrance. When have we let capitalists take what nature created?
I know, I know. Society! That is how society works, they would say. There must be some rules and there must be the maintenance of the pond. We can’t have anybody just swimming around. People would be drowning without lifeguards, so we need to have some infrastructure and we need to pay for it. For fuck’s sake! I know all of that.
And bizarrely enough, when I see those old, fat, naked Brits, I am thinking how grateful they must be for these lifeguards.
“Oh, come on, can you just let me in? How was I supposed to know I had to book it online?” I asked the gatekeeper. “I rode this bike from far because there were rail strikes,” I pointed at my bicycle locked by the fence. “Don’t leave me outside.”
So he let me in.
Two old, bearded Orthodox Jews entered the changing room and went to the side opposite the nudists, far away from this big bellies blasphemy. They had those funny hats on their heads and side curls made of hair hanging down from underneath the hats. One was holding a towel, while the other one was changing.
Labelling
Ok, I get it, I am being edgy here. I mentioned a hairy-legged Indian, an extrovert gay, fat Brits, and two old Jews. I know that anarchism is about the dissolution of labels, rather than making them. For an anarchist, there are no Jews, Christians, Indians, or Brits. No spiritual or physical borders. No racial borders either. No sexual ones! Governments can only exist within borders. And the government is the single greatest enemy of anarchy. That is why an anarchist should refrain from putting labels.
But how would I express to you those beautifully amusing scenes from the changing room without labels? It is not the same if two Brits are holding each other a towel, hiding their small dicks, or two Jews, whose balls are hanging down to the ground, are holding each other a towel.
It is equally funny, but it is different. And if it is equally funny, then, in my world, that is the ultimate dissolution of the labels. Jokes are beyond labels. Art is beyond labels.
Yes, there are still labels, but they are here to make our lives more comical, and fulfilled, to enrich the realm of form. Only that. Labels are not in the service of any identification. A Brit is no better than a Jew, an Ukrainian is no better than a Russian. A vaxxed is no better than an anti-vaxxed. A straight is no better than a gay. White then black!
Only politics, church, capitalism, and other sources of power can claim differently.
At that moment, a black guy in red cowboy boots entered and put a foot on the bench next to me. He had short trousers and shorts as Thomas Magnum used to wear. He was topless. He was speaking Russian to another guy.
“A black guy speaking Russian,” I thought. “What in the world is going on??”
“You would be in trouble if there were some Ukrainians here,” the other guy told him as he checked around the changing room. His look stopped at me for a second.
I nodded my head as if I was telling him, “I am not a Ukrainian.”
“Well, I would speak Ukrainian if I studied Ukrainian and not Russian,” the guy in cowboy boots replied.
I went out of the changing room to swim. The Indian was still hanging from the pull-up bar.
I jumped into the pond and did some dog paddling. Before I had a chance to take a rest, I was already touching those little buoys that marked the end of the designated swimming area. I hung on a buoy and breathed heavily. There were a couple of ducks on the other side of the barrier. I was looking at them.
“Are you enjoying your freedom? There is nothing bad on that side of the barrier, right?” I asked the ducks and swam across the barrier. I was floating on my back. Just as I started feeling a little bit uncomfortable about crossing the barrier, a lifeguard stood up from his chair and shouted: “Get back in the swimming area, mate.”
“The border,” I thought as I got back in. “It is funny how controlled humans are, and that is only because of the borders.
No borders — no power. No power — no control.
They have given us the area to swim, and if we cross it, we are considered outlaws. But there is nothing different outside that area. Still the same pond, the same water. Same air. The ducks get that. Humans do not. Humans see the barrier and their conditioned minds believe crossing it means being immoral. As that cunt Emmanuel Macron says — people who don’t stick to the rules are not citizens.
Control
“Why are we so controlled and you are not,” I asked the ducks. I know why! Because only those who fear can be controlled.
“And you ducks, my friends, you are not afraid. You just chill. If you are attacked by a lake monster, you just deal with it at the point of happening. You are present.”
Fear is an emotion, which means it has a root in a thought. A thought exists only in time. And humans live in the future, afraid of something that has not yet happened. And then humans seek protection… But get controlled along with it.
Control and protection are two sides of the same coin. One does not exist without the other.
The question is what do we need the protection from? I doubt we are afraid of monsters, though. Or perhaps, we have seen so many films about lake monsters that we have some collective fear of depths that we seek protection from. Is it all Hollywood-fabricated fear that keeps us controlled?
The gatekeeper came and shouted that we had five minutes to get out of the pond and dress up as our time was out. I went out of the water. The Indian guy was still hanging with his hairy legs. A skinny Englishman was air swimming and a young man was reading a book with swimming glasses on.
“Dude, you are standing on my towel,” I told the guy in the cowboy boots.
“What is the thing with stepping on other’s towels here?” I asked myself.
As I left the complex, there was another pond just a couple of hundreds of meters away. Same water. Same ducks. No fence. No gatekeepers. And no people. Just a big sign saying: “No swimming!”
“Why?” I asked myself.
Finally, a man jumped into the pond.
“Fucking anarchist,” I thought. “That one is not afraid of monsters.”
