This month my website turns eighteen years old (despite some miscalculations over the years), and here’s a cheeky bit of fun to mark the occasion. Actually, we seem to be going the opposite direction, as eagle-eyed regulars may have noticed. While I’m a pro-sexual-expression kind of guy, and have no hang-ups when it comes to nudity and nakedness, I’ve been drawn to more spiritual and ethereal concerns of late, and that has likely bled into the content that’s been produced here. Such concerns have always played a part here, they’re just becoming more prominent and important, while other more salacious turns fade into the background.
The sparkle of a glistening male model emerging from the sea a la James Bond may always be a thrill, but there is sparkle in other things as well – and a spiritual sort of sparkle seems to last longer and resonate more deeply with my frequency these days. Not that there isn’t room for both to happily coexist, and there’s a valuable lesson in that too. Binary limits are so early 2000’s. With that in mind, here are a few cheeky photos from roughly a year ago, when I was still able to go to Boston without care or worry, a time that feels very far away, when it was but a year. It’s amazing how much can happen in a year. And it’s even more remarkable for how much can happen in the eighteen years since I first put this website into the world.
The year was 2003, and websites and blogs were only beginning to take off. I didn’t do much online in those early days – it was mostly a repository for my writing and photographs – and I definitely wasn’t updating anything on a daily basis. There were also no projects on display, which made for a sparse and rather sterile environment. Social media itself was in its infancy, and FaceBook, Twitter and Instagram didn’t even exist. In this brave new world, a personal website seemed rather quaint, and those early long-lost posts were surely the stuff of such innocence. While the posts have populated and grown, and the intertwining links have created an extensive web of its own, the main simplicity and sparse format has remained, and is one of the reasons it’s lasted this long. Avoiding the bells and whistles of the online world, and aside from a brief experiment with comments that didn’t last, not much has changed here as we begin our 18thyear.
In some ways, this blog has become a diary of sorts, and there are entries where I’ve revealed more than I probably should have, and lots where I haven’t. It’s a ritual and habit that is now second nature, and while that once held albatross connotations, I’ve reconciled myself to its soothing, consistent nature. As a Virgo, if you believe in such things, I enjoy organization and structure. As a human, I enjoy working within and without those constructs, challenging and pushing and rezoning as necessary. There is something thrilling about contained chaos, of operating within a prescribed space, and in that prescription feeling the freedom of knowing anything can be done within such a safety zone.
Now that we are eighteen, and have been doing this longer than any other personal blog I can think of, I feel even more freedom, but instead of going hardcore full-frontal, I find bigger thrills in other forms of revelation. A new honesty in what can and should be tolerated, a new honesty in what exactly I want in life, a new honesty in how I’m working to better myself – and a few new tweaks in the logistics and features we’ve had here over the past few years.
The first of these changes is the reconfiguration of our not-quite-venerable Hunk of the Day feature. What started out as a simple eye candy/guy candy display has, at its best, turned into something deeper and more honorable, where the recipients were less interested in showing off their physical features and more about doing something that made a bigger difference in the world. To that end and purpose, I wanted to open it up to women and non-binary persons, which always made the ‘Hunk’ moniker problematic. More on that shortly.
As for our 18thbirthday, it is a low-key if cheeky affair, as befitting life in the time of a pandemic. We will find other ways to celebrate and mark the occasion, and I’d like to draw it out. There is pleasure in anticipation, joy in elongating a moment of calm and peace and waiting.
