(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 ...

In a little under a month I'll be celebrating my 63rd birthday, which pretty much puts me squarely in the "old" category. Not old enough to retire, but that eventuality is within sight. Over the last few years I've been posting about my aging, physicality, and sexuality, and how each of them impacts the others. It's been a journey, along which I seem to have touched at least a handful of people along the way. According to the blog stats my little essays have received more than 110,000 hits. Whether that means a hundred thousand people have read each and every one of the essays is debatable, as I'm sure there are more than a few who come for the pictures. "I see. And how long have you felt like this?" But for me it's been rewarding because, as I've noted a few times, this has proven to be good therapy for me. And it costs a heckuva lot less than paying an analyst for help. (Though I'll grant you, I probably would've gotten a lot more u...

  (Note to self. Don't make a New Years' resolution promising more entries before checking to make sure you've got enough topics and content you want to talk about first. It's been months since I had something nipping at my heels...) I've written previously about the fact I am a huge fan of bodywork. All sorts of massages and therapies. To me it satisfies two different needs with a single experience: muscle relaxation/pain relief, and the need for human contact. Touch. Skin to skin extended intimacy, not for sexual gratification but for physical stimulation of our largest sensory organ, the skin. In the last couple years I've written about particularly special experiences in Barcelona and San Diego, but have been unable to duplicate those experiences here in my hometown. My favorite of the more popular bodywork modalities is Thai massage, which involves a lot of stretching, combined with an oil and hot stone massage, which involves a lot of long-stroke rubs acro...

  There is, I think, a healthy trend that I am seeing with celebrities and so-called influencers towards better body acceptance. Nudity acceptance, to be specific. I don't mean social nudity, but comfort in your own skin nudity. Acceptance that nobody - nobody - possesses a perfect body.  Just this morning is a news report on singer songwriter Shania Twain posing nude for her most recent album cover.  "If I look at myself from head to toe in the mirror I see my faults … I’m just tired of that lack of freedom. I wanna be more relaxed and comfortable in my own skin," she said. "When you’re naked, now you’re relying entirely on your own love of yourself and respect for yourself." It's a trend, particularly among singers and female singers in particular, and actors - male actors in particular - who are intent on breaking up the taboos and limitations of being embarrassed by our own bodies. Singer Amy Sheppard,of the Australian pop group Sheppard, launched a camp...

As I write this I have recently been banned from a particular online sexual forum which shall remain nameless. It was unexpected and a bit embarrassing. I ran afoul of their age-related guidelines when I responded to a question regarding your first sexual experience. Since mine was a few years before 18, I commented on my first post -of age sex while noting it wasn't my first actual  time and made reference to that fact with a link to this blog for the details of that first fuck.  Oops. Sorry guys. So, lifetime ban. Yeah, I get it and am not protesting it. Just moving on. Anyone who reads me regularly knows I am dead-set against both underage- and victimizing sexualization. I'm sanguine that the moderator just has a solid red line and I'm okay with that, though it has to be acknowledge that for many of us sex began before 18. But it brings up the subject of our various taboos. What we can talk about, and what can we do, depends greatly upon who is there and what are their o...

It's New Year's Eve 2022, and yet I'm up at my customary 4:30am. Out of habit rather than necessity, since it's Saturday and I don't need to rush off to work. I'm in my robe sitting in the dark family room listening to the sound of the rain on the roof and the gentle snore of my dogs as they sleep. In an hour I will doff the robe and run through my morning exercises. The holiday season has made a rather serious dent in my physical improvement. I had been down thirty pounds, and exercising up to 45 minutes a day, but since mid-November my habits have slipped. I fell off keto and have gained a handful of pounds back, and gotten lazy with the exercise. That all changes tomorrow. Back on keto, back on intermittent fasting. Love this picture... Much of my thoughts lately have been on physical enjoyment. I'm, as I've described myself, a Bohemian Hedonist at heart, even if my day-to-day lifestyle doesn't seem to reflect it. I have a deep appreciation for th...

(The title, for those who don't speak Spanish, translates as "Dance with Me." You'll understand in a moment.) Here it is December of 2022 and the year has flown by, as I'm sure it has for you. I don't even remember much of November. It seems we just celebrated Halloween when Thanksgiving rushed by. And now we're on the verge of the December holidays.  Unreal. I've struggled with a topic for this entry. I'm worried about the repetition of my entries, and while I try to do something new and have a reason for posting, at some point when you have a hundred-fifteen articles you tend to duplicate a lot of things - though hopefully with updated thinking rather than reposts of the same information said a different way. It may seem to some readers I'm obsessed with labels. In my own way I like to categorize myself and things around me. Not for any reason of needing to do so, but because I hope to convey a particular sense of something to a casual reade...