When I restarted this blog a couple weeks ago I had some concern that, having previously run out of things to say, it might be expecting too much of myself to find new things and revisit some previous entries. Fortunately, my imagination has kicked in and I find myself making little notes about potential new topics. Enough so I have at least a couple/three months worth of bi-weekly essays to come. Thanks for sticking with me through this long gestation. One old man (not me) It strikes me I need to do some editing on the artwork for this site. The sub-heading on the banner above is "One middle-aged man's take on sex, society, and his penis."  I am forced, kicking and screaming, to acknowledge that this is now "One old man's take..." Yep. I am now officially in the "old" category. When I started this blog - actually when I started its predecessor, which ran for a couple of years before its email account was compromised - I was in my mid-fifties, sti...

(Apologies for the relative lack of pictures. Blogger is having fits of some kind and not posting all of my selections. And when it does, it's a wrestling match to get them properly placed.) Well. Hello. It's been a while. Mainly because I felt I'd covered all the topics I wanted to cover and nothing else was coming to mind. but I can tell some things are percolating, so the long (year and a half!)  creative dry spell is over. Well...sort of. Let me catch you up to date, then on to the new topic. My sex life is still pretty much non-existent save for my own private efforts. My wife and I had a pretty decent level of activity until she had a medical emergency that pretty much stopped cold her ability to have/want sex.  Unfortunately for me, I love sex. I love sexuality. I love bringing pleasure to someone else. I love experiencing skin on skin and the intimate moments between people. That, to me, was a major part of my being until my wife's crisis. Sex was a fundamental ...

Like many people watching tv, at least according to published ratings, I am enjoying the new streaming show The Last of Us on HBO. If you're unfamiliar with it, the premise is that in a post-apocalyptic world one person has been shown to be immune to the condition that has killed the majority of the world's population and turned a bunch of the remainders into zombies. It's a fairly standard science fiction trope, though with the twist that the infection was fungal not viral or bacterial. It's based on a video game. The show is well done and entertaining, and features a few of my favorite actors. Bella Ramsey, Anna Torv So why the fuck and I writing about a tv show that, at least so far, is decidedly nonsexual and features zero nudity? (Again, at least so far..) There was a line delivered by actor Anna Torv's character Tess in the first or second episode which grated on my nerves and has stuck with me. One of the characters, the one who is immune to the disease, is ...

In college I had a girlfriend who was utterly fascinated by the fact that testicles move.  For the uninitiated, the evolutionary design of our balls is to enable the production of sperm, which requires temperatures a bit below the normal body temp. The solution is to have the testes hang just outside the body cavity, cooling them just enough that they can freely produce copious amounts of swimming tadpoles, who, ideally, will race hellbent towards an ovum once they're deposited in a uterus. Okay, so much for the technical. Our balls hang outside the body, but since outside conditions change they can drop and contract, pulling, as necessary, free of the body when you're in warmer conditions such as a beach in Barcelona or a sauna in Sweden. Chill dude Conversely they can contract, as in the classic Seinfeld episode in which George screams "shrinkage" when a woman sees his chill-reduced package. The testicles pull up tightly against the body hoping to share s...