If there’s one reassuring thing about being a complete failure in life, as I have been, it is that you are not a prisoner of your accomplishments. Consider, if you will, Robert Plant. It’s been about thirty-five years since Led Zeppelin crashed to a halt, and in those years he’s done everything from an Eighties keyboard-rock record (the underrated Now And Zen) to a stint with Official Bluegrass Babe Alison Krauss and playing the ukelele with the Sensational Space Shifters. Problem is, nobody really cares about that shit. What everybody really wants is to see him fronting a perpetual world tour with the O2-Arena Zep lineup. Playing the hits, even if they are two steps down. With Bonzo’s bald kid pounding the drums in suspiciously click-tracky fashion. Visiting your hometown once a year until both he and Pagey have been certified dead by multiple independent coroners.

Plant’s refusal to give the people what they want, in particular his unveiled distaste for singing Stairway To Heaven, is verging on the Salingerian nowadays. It’s also stupid and selfish. A billion people want him to do something and he won’t do it. Yet I have sympathy for him. Imagine that the entire globe defined you entirely by things you did before your thirtieth birthday — and they want you to keep doing the same thing until you’re dead. By contrast, although my BMX Basics website would occasionally get a half-million hits in a month back in the day, I am completely unaware of any widely-held desire for me to give up writing about cars and return to writing about bicycles. Nor am I currently the prisoner of any particular success. If I quit writing about cars tomorrow and wrote about something else entirely, I suspect that seven nines (that’s 99.99999%, just in case you spent more time pulling off panties than you did programming computers as a teenager) of the world would not even notice.

Leonard Nimoy is more like Robert Plant than he is like me. He hated being Spock, the same way Roger Waters hated being the talented part of Pink Floyd, and like Waters he eventually came around to the idea of being his own tribute band when he realized that the alternative — becoming a nonperson like the rest of us — was both depressing and remarkably non-remunerative. Thus you get that Spock-vs.-Spock Web video that all the Audi blogs thought was so nifty. But Nimoy was also passionate about indulging the non-Spock parts of his talent, which is how it came to pass that he saw, and photographed, one of my OKCupid dates naked two years before I got the chance to do it myself.

The story goes like this: About three years ago, for a reason best characterized as “spite”, I set up an OKCupid profile and launched myself half-assedly into the world of online dating. As those of you who have been there yourselves could easily guess, I found it utterly horrifying. I scanned through a few hundred profiles and I messaged about twenty of them. Eight or nine agreed to go on a date with me. I’m told this is a very high ratio, by the way. It’s probably because I didn’t bother to reach out to anybody over about an Ohio 7.0 or so, and I didn’t reach out to anybody under the age of twenty-six.

I took my son on my first-ever OKCupid date, because it was my night to watch him. This horrified my son’s mother, by the way. It didn’t horrify my date. She was a kind, generous, lovely woman in her late twenties with an interesting job and interesting hobbies. We got along like a house afire and went on maybe ten dates including a day spent with the Road&Track crew at Putnam Park. At the end of that night she slipped into bed with me. In the space of the two scented seconds our bodies spent under the covers I imagined everything. We’d have brilliant sex because we were both brilliant people. Then we’d become inseparable and that would upset me and at some point I’d have to start lying to her and seeing other people and making her very unhappy and eventually she’d be as miserable as everybody else I’d ever dated.

For the first time in my life, my desire to not ruin someone’s life won out over my desire to carve another notch. “Uh, I’m really sleepy,” I said, at which point I started pretending to snore. That was our last date, although after my crash last January I had lunch with her a few times on general principle. Two months ago I saw her in an airport. She was clearly miffed at me and I experienced, for possibly the first-ever time, the warm glow of virtuous satisfaction.

So that was the one great person I met on OKCupid. I’ll remember the rest, the ones I can remember, as:

• The chunky PhD
• The chunky foodie who insisted that I try a “sushi caterpillar” at a restaurant where there was no actual food as I know it
• The chunky Goth who was very interested in having sex with me in front of her husband, a GoPro, or a combination of both
• The chunky twenty-something who was absolutely astounding when it came to knowledge of English literature and trenchant wit but whose panties, upon closer inspection, would have served in a pinch for an America’s Cup yacht mainsail
• “Snaggletooth”

Last but not least, came the subject of this tale — yes, we’re finally here, after eight hundred words. She was a not-bad-looking-in-headshot-photos redhead who agreed to meet me at a bar down the street from my house. At this point, I’d learned that every single woman on OKCupid would have been fantasy material for Jame Gumb’s Woman-Skin Outfit Sewing World but I was still taken aback by her sheer size as she perched on the barstool.

At this point I should note that I was in no way single during this OKCupid process. I had the attention of a few high-quality women already. But, as previously noted, I was dating for spite. I was angry with my entire stable for a variety of dimly remembered reasons. As I continued to OKDate, however, it was increasingly obvious, however, that the only person getting spitten, if that’s even a word, was me. Oh well. Don’t underestimate spite. That night, given the choice between going home to have sex with a woman who used to command a thousand bucks a night in Hollywood just to look at the goods, driving to another state to curl up in the arms of a woman who would have jumped on a grenade for me, and paying the bar tab for a going-nowhere chat with a “BBW”, I chose the last and least of the options.

Amazingly, she was fascinating after a fashion. She wrote a sex advice column for alternative newspapers and was a mainstay of the burlesque performance scene. We were almost of an age, but she looked like she could be early thirties in the right light. We had a mutual friend, an openly gay musician and itinerant coke addict, and she told the story of how she took his virginity in the Eighties and probably pushed him over the edge, so to speak. When the first bar closed, we went to a second one, with the intention of closing that one down, too.

From about ten minutes into the conversation, she had made it plain that she expected the evening to end with us having sex. I was feeling remarkably diffident about this. While my regular readers probably have a mental image of me as being affected with the same uncritical priapism as a Mayan fertility-ritual statue the truth is that I can be put off my appetite pretty easily and for reasons that would appear ridiculous to other people because they are, in fact, ridiculous. So while this woman was pretty cool and I was sure that she knew all sorts of things to do in bed, my decision was made early on that I was going to shake her hand after last call then head home for some quality time with my laser-sharp recollection of a night I’d recently had in Florida with a half-Puerto-Rican hairdresser. I was therefore free to just drink a bit, enjoy myself, and listen to her talk about everything under the moon.

At some point, apropos of nothing, she said, “…and that was when I was doing the photo shoot with Leonard Nimoy.” I took the cliched long look at my empty glass of Ketel One. Did she just say something about a photo shoot with Spock?

“I’m sorry,” I said, “I thought you said ‘Leonard Nimoy’.”

“He’s an actor,” she replied. “He played a character named Mr. Spock on a television show…” For a moment I was exuberant that I’d charmed this woman into both being an easy lay and thinking that I was the kind of person who had no knowledge of Star Trek whatsoever.

“This… ah, Nimoy fellow,” I drawled, still a bit in love with the idea of a Jack Baruth who had never, ever, stored his race car in the warehouse of a company devoted entirely to selling Star Trek memorabilia, “you say he photographed you?”

“Oh yes,” she chirped. “I did a few days of nude shoots with him.”

“No, I think I’ve had enough,” I said to the bartender, holding my trembling hand over the glass. “You did nude shoots with Leonard Nimoy?” I asked my companion, by way of clarification.

“Yes, he made a book of the pictures.” Any minute now, Ashton Kutcher was going to come running into the scene to tell me I was being “Punk’d” or something like that. While I sat on the barstool with my mouth hanging open, my date told me about how Nimoy came to see her burlesque show in Los Angeles and then afterwards convinced her to pose for a series of nude photos together with a bunch of other, ahem, plus-sized ladies. Before she could finish the story, it was last call. “So,” she said, “are you in a hurry to get home?”

“Oh yes,” I replied, “I have to be up early tomorrow.” We both knew what I meant. She was just too chunky for me to pull the trigger. At this point, the fairer-minded among you will point out that I have not been seen in public without a potbelly of sorts since around the Year Of Our Lord 2001. You’re right. I’m not slim and I’m also not terribly good-looking. This would spell the end of my dating prospects were I a gay man but I’m not and women have different criteria. The equivalent to being a fat girl, I think, is being an unemployed man with no prospects. It doesn’t mean that nobody will sleep with you. It just narrows down the market. I could get even fatter than I am and still seduce attractive women well below my age. I just can’t lose more than one of the following: my job, my self-confidence, my hair, my home. It’s not fair but it’s also not fair that for a man, wearing your BestBuy polo shirt to a date will put you on the bullet train to Incel City. If you don’t like it, send a WhatsApp to God. Maybe He’s listening.

My Nine Eleven hadn’t stopped ticking softly in my driveway back home before I’d verified the truth of my new friend’s claims. Leonard Nimoy had, in fact, recently created a book called “The Full Body Project”. I’m not going to link to it here. You can find it if you like, but I don’t recommend that you do so. After just a few moments of looking through the photographs online, I recognized my date. She was the slimmest girl in the book, which is not something I would have suspected prior to actually seeing the photos. And yes, she was totally naked. I zoomed the photo until it filled my laptop screen and then I breathed a quiet sigh of self-satisfaction at having chosen to go home alone. How do you manage to be both a size 22 and a B-cup?

Fascinated, I read more about the project, including a long-form interview with its creator. Nimoy was, apparently, trying to make some sort of statement. He was careful to note that he did not find any of the women he’d photographed attractive, but that the general concept of beauty needed to be expanded to include them. Typical limo-lib, really. Fat girls for thee but not for Nimoy, who married this solid 8.5 in the Fifties because, presumably, there just weren’t any chubby burlesque dancers to be had. In the dreary world to come, proles will be issued BBWs and any complaints will be met with a charge of sexism/racism/whateverism. The conviction shall be automatic and the penalty shall be death. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a man humping away indifferently on top of a sex-positive super-sizer, forever.

The interviewer was tactful enough not to mention that the concept of this this book would have never merited more than a solid heave into a trashcan from anyone had Mr. Nimoy not donned pointy plastic ears and pranced around a television set full of sparkly fake rocks back in 1970.

In the last few days, the progressive press has “discovered” the Full Body Project book and used it as proof positive that Leonard Nimoy was a feminist icon, worthy of canonization in the pages of Salon and elsewhere. While they might be right, I’d like to think that the book was a spectacular piece of performance art on the author’s part, an attempt to clearly demonstrate the ludicrous extent of celebrity culture and reality-resistant media and what they call “pretty lies” over at the Chateau Heartiste. I want to believe that Nimoy made the book to display absurdity in its purest form, to show how the entire concept of “art” has been degraded beyond rescue in the twenty-first century, as a shank to the heart of a modern aesthetic that values social acceptability over intrinsic merit and will punish anyone who has the courage to disagree.

Alternately, he was a secret chubby chaser.

Either way, he’s dead. My relationship with my OKCupid pal is long dead as well, although there was a denouement to our interactions too bizarre for me to actually put on virtual paper for you until everybody involved is past the prospect of being harmed by its disclosure. And yes, the story includes a sixty-year-old cross-dressing millionaire and a Buddha-like gay yoga instructor, just in case you were curious.

Shortly after that first (and last) date, I deactivated my OKCupid account. I’d spent dozens of hours and hundreds of dollars on these dates and I had nothing to show for it except a bloodied knee (long story) and a membership in a local amateur theater company (longer still). All I’d learned was that I was a lot pickier about women than I’d thought I was, and that I was increasingly interested in the idea of being alone. When the spring of 2013 arrived, I flattered myself that I’d put aside childish things and was in the process of refocusing on my career, my son, my writing. But it was a lie. I was still broken, still restless, still in motion. As Mr. Plant once wrote, knowing that nobody wanted him to write anything more, but also knowing that he wasn’t yet willing to be trapped in the amber of his twenties forever:

My love is in league with the freeway
Oh the freeway, and the coming of night-time
My love is in league with the freeway