The song remains the same

As I enter my last two hours as a 53 year old, I'm reflecting on where my life is now. And, frankly, it's just as shit as it was, say, 40 years ago, as I transitioned from 13 to 14. I'm still hiding my real self, still on the outside, looking in, seeing what I most want almost every day, but without the slightest hope of fulfillment. Tomorrow is another day. Just the same as today.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Satisfaction

Maybe I'm getting easier to please in my old age, but something that happened at lunchtime today gave me what I might almost call a 'rush'. I'd walked into a branch of a very well known (over here, at least) bookseller, and within a few minutes, I had in my hand, now, in 2014, in spite of all the hysteria and paranoia the subject matter of the book engenders, a copy of a book about a love affair between a man, albeit a very young man, and a boy. A copy of the 2013 reissue of Sandel, of course. They'd 'hidden' it in the 'Gay Fiction' section, rather than on the general fiction shelves (something that might be controversial in itself, in some LGBT circles, given that there is more than enough hatred of boylovers amongst gays, without having to wait for 'Straightland' to weigh in), but, even so, the fact that the book was there at all was a very big deal for me. I bought the book, even though I've owned a copy of the earlier edition for three years or so, the superficial illogicality being explained in terms of the older copy being potentially fragile - forty-odd year old paperbacks aren't the most robust objects known to man - and by the fact that I like the 'picture cover'. You can never have too many (unequivocally legal) pictures of cuties, as far as I'm concerned.
I did buy another book, too, which happened to catch my eye as I wandered around the shop, a collection of Kafka short stories (I had the 'Complete Short Stories' before the 2012 meltdown, but....meh), including one I think is simply amazing, a story called The Burrow. If anyone has read it, or gets the chance to read it, I'd be interested to hear if you think that there's a better evocation of paranoia anywhere.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

The perils of digital media

Those zeroes and ones, they're so dangerous. When your life can be destroyed by having those binary digits decoded, why would anyone commit anything in the slightest controversial, still less illegal, to silicon? Particularly to a USB stick, which can then be stolen remarkably easily. (The thief will now, doubtless, be feted as a heroine.) What an inane way to lose everything, up to and including your very existence. Days like this, I feel like deleting my blog, my e-mail accounts, everything that I've ever done in cyberspace. But it would, of course, make no difference, because all of those words will still be retained somewhere - the internet never forgets. As Orwell wrote, 'nothing (is) your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull'. His powers of prophecy never cease to amaze me.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

More self-censorship

There's been a story running in the news here today that I felt I wanted to comment on, but, for far from the first time of late, I've found myself unable to write about what I really think, because I simply don't want to lay myself open to getting involved in slanging matches. So, just a general postulate - if a boylover has a series of relationships over many years, is still described as 'popular', despite being seen, in conventional terms, as 'getting away with' his 'abuse', then maybe, just maybe - shock, horror - were some, if not all of the relationships....consensual? Thoughtcrime, I know, daring to challenge the orthodoxy of boylovers only being motivated by animalistic lust and the desire for self-gratification. That those of us who are attracted to boys might actually love and care for them as well - unthinkable. But, of course, thinking is what rarely, if ever, happens in this context.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Sandel revisited

Given that I was (lightheartedly) chided last time around, I'll make sure I say it this time - SPOILER ALERT!

As I mentioned in my last post, I've recently been rereading Sandel for the first time since I finally managed to find a reasonably affordable copy, nearly three years ago. As I wrote in my post about the book at the time, I still think the ending of the story is a depressing cop-out, but the vast majority of the book is deserving of its 'cult classic' status. When I searched online to see if there were any recent reviews, I found several, but two in particular stand out, for almost opposite reasons. One was generally laudatory of the book, and made the point, which I completely agree with, that Sandel is one of those books which repays rereading, because there are always things that you miss first time around. I certainly saw things in the story this time that I'd totally overlooked, including one briefly sketched, but psychologically central aspect of the plot, namely the suicide of David's unrequited 'first love'. The second 'review', if I can call it that, given that it was a one-paragraph comment, was all too predictable, a kneejerk parroting of tabloid pablum, namely that the commenter would only give the story the minimum one star, not because of its literary merits, or otherwise, but because of the subject matter - 'pederasty....illegal and immoral'. I'd argue that a consensual relationship between a 13 and a 19 year old, whether real or fictional, couldn't possibly qualify as pederasty in any case, but it was the closed-mindedness that I found so irritating and depressing - 'I don't like the idea, so therefore it's irredeemably wrong', the hallmark of bigots everywhere.
I came across a couple of other things I didn't know, as well, through my Google search the other day. Firstly, that there has been a theatrical adaptation of the novel, at last year's Edinburgh Festival fringe, although the one review of the play I could find wasn't all that positive - on the play's theatrical merits, I hasten to add, not it's subject matter. Whatever else, the actor who'd played Tony was, from the couple of promotional photos I saw, completely wrong for the role, at least visually - one of the central premises of the plot is around the preternatural beauty of Tony's voice, and his corresponding physical beauty, whereas the actor was, I'm afraid, both much too old and nowhere near good-looking enough, to the point where he looked like an adult portraying some kind of satirical caricature of a choirboy. The fact that there had been such an adaptation at all amazed me, though, in the face of the current (and longstanding) hysteria about 'paedos'. I have no expectation that the production marks any sort of crack in the unbroken tide of opprobrium, but that it happened at all, apparently without lynchings and riots in the streets ensuing, offers a crumb, at least, of encouragement. The second discovery I made brought out a much more petty reaction from me, though - in the wake of the play, the book has been republished for the first time in 40-odd years. After the trouble I had in finding a copy at any sort of price that wasn't off in the stratosphere - I eventually paid £40, but I saw copies on sale for hundreds and hundreds of pounds - to find that I could now pick up a brand new copy for a tenner (or download a Kindle version for even less!) was frustrating, to say the least. Not to mention the no doubt severely detrimental effect on the resale value of my copy, of course!

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

A tale of two tales

52 weeks ago today, after several weeks of work, I clicked the 'publish' icon, and a story appeared in Nephelokokkygia. All 60-odd thousand words of it. Since then, I've probably only published a few hundred words in that blog, none of them in prose form. I've been reading that story again - yet again - over the past few days. I've also been reading, for only the second time, and in much smaller helpings, another story. And the sense of my inadequacy as a writer has become overwhelming. It's something I want to be able to do, and to do well, but it's clear to me now that I'm simply not good enough. The story whose anniversary falls today is, of course, Alexandrine, and, much as I still love the eponymous hero, if that story is the best I can do, and I'm pretty sure it is, there's no point in my continuing the pretence, the conceit, that I could ever be a writer. And that feeling has been cemented in the past 48 hours by the other story, now I'm seriously getting back into again. Sandel. The divine Tony eclipsing my Xander on every level. Will I ever write anything fictional again? I have my doubts.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Sad stories

This is almost where I came in - reading online stories that, time and again, made me cry, like the one I read this afternoon. But then I found Twinergy, and realised that some could make me smile, too. (And that there was a whole 'Blogworld' out there, with its own joys and sorrows.) Whether the stories bring tears or happiness, though, it's all fiction, while my reality continues to be as disheartening as ever. My fault, no doubt, for wanting something that's unobtainable, or seemingly so. 'There's got to be something in it for you', my sister-in-law memorably said, over two years ago now. But there still isn't, and that absence of light, of hope, has become very difficult to contend with.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

In the garden

I've hesitated to begin this post, because, not for the first time, I'm aware of the assumptions that some would make, but, as ever, all I can do is to tell the truth, and if people choose to disbelieve me, then that's something I've no control over.
One of the slightly strange ambitions I have is to visit every Wetherspoons pub in Greater London, and I've managed to visit four new ones in the past two days. The last of the four, this afternoon, was notable for two reasons. Firstly, it was probably the nicest I've found so far in my odd odyssey, very smart inside, and with a nice, sunny beer garden (I'll forgive them the artificial grass!) where I settled myself to enjoy the very pleasantly warm spring sunshine, and, most conveniently, it's more or less on a bus route that runs within ten minutes walk of the flat. The second thing, though, was specific to today, and the source of my reluctance to blog about what happened. I noticed him not long after I'd arrived, wandering about the garden, seemingly unattached to anyone out there. A little boy, not cute at all, if I'm being honest, meandering between the tables, sitting down a little away from whoever was occupying the various spaces. He came to my table a couple of times, sat down, got up, came back, went away again, then disappeared into the pub. When he came outside again a few minutes later, he fell on the small flight of steps leading down into the garden, and obviously hurt himself. He got up, seemingly trying not to cry. No-one took the slightest interest in him, frankly, so when he walked back in my direction, still looking shaken up and upset, I couldn't help asking him if he was alright. The eagerness he showed in engaging me in conversation was almost disconcerting, and pretty conclusive evidence that his wandering around on his own wasn't coincidental. It turned out that he was 6, nearly 7 - he said his birthday is in three weeks time - and, from other things he said, it sounded like his life is far from ideal. An absent, (physically) abusive father, a mother who doesn't seem to take any interest in him at all - he said that she'd seen him fall, but there was no sign of her appearing to check on his condition. The woman did eventually emerge, to tell the boy that they were leaving, but, even then, she turned her back on him and left him to follow in his own time. I have not the slightest expectation that I'll see him again, but I wish so much that there was anything I could do to make his life better. But that, of course, would be 'grooming'. Because all that boylovers want is self-gratification, never the well-being of the boy.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Existential

A day or two, K's around, albeit doing her own thing for a good part of the time, the sun's shining, and life doesn't seem so bad. But now my girl is gone, off to see the love of her life, and having seen her off at the station, it wasn't long before I found myself on a bus, sitting opposite a cutish boy, 14, give or take, who I knew I could never get close to, and all the hopelessness, the despair, of my life and where it's brought me comes flooding back in. I feel like crying, except that it would be utterly pointless, would change nothing. Yeah, I know, another day, another worthless bout of self-pity, but, frankly, my existence is shit.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

I'd say I don't believe it....

....but it happens so often as to be almost tediously predictable. Namely that when I'm due some time off - I'm working this afternoon, before heading into four days off - my immune system decides it's time for an outage, and I start feeling ill. It's all the worse in this case because I'm feeling very chesty, coughing frequently and uncomfortably, reminiscent of the beginnings of what happened last year, which led to me ending up in hospital. By coincidence, I've got an appointment at my new doctors' tomorrow, which was only supposed to be for a medication review, but I'll certainly mention this latest health hiccup as well. K is here, too, and I neither want to infect her - her asthma has flared up lately, and she's back on regular inhalers for the first time in three or four years - nor miss out on the very limited time I'm going to get to spend with her, given that she's supposedly spending the first half of tomorrow with her friend who's visiting London, then heading off to her boyfriend's on Tuesday. Maybe this bout of less than perfect health won't amount to anything, but, knowing my luck, I'm not counting on that eventuality.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Plan Z

It seems that K's school holiday plans are changing almost by the hour. She is still coming to stay at the flat, but the two full days I was hoping that we might have together appear to have shrunk until there's only going to be half a day left, if I'm lucky. The latest version of the itinerary sees her arriving in London on Saturday to go to one of her YouTuber 'gatherings', staying for three nights, and then going off to her boyfriend's on Tuesday morning. The problem with that, from my perspective, is that I'm working lates on Saturday and Sunday, so will be, including my commute, out of circulation from 11:00 to 11:00 on each day, then on Monday, my first day off, K will be spending at least half of the day with another friend, who, coincidentally, is in London that day. So I get Monday late afternoon/evening with my girl. Maybe. The joys of being a teenager's parent, I guess!

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Common cause

So now we know what it takes to unite Christians and Muslims. Bigotry.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Desire

It doesn't happen too often, in the very visceral way it did this afternoon, but happen it undoubtedly did on this occasion. He was 13, maybe 14, getting on a bus at Brent Cross immediately in front of me. And I wanted him. Badly. If he'd been female, and two or three years older, my desire would, at worst, have seen me jokingly labelled as a 'dirty old man'. But because he was a boy, had I allowed my wanting to show, I would've been 'depraved', the lowest of the low. The encounter, brief as it was, left me feeling emotionally drained, even borderline depressed. It's a choice, of course. All the haters will tell you so.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Curates' eggs, and all that

K's first visit to the flat has had, shall we say, a mixed outcome. She liked what will become her home in around three months time, a relief for me, because it would've been gravely embarrassing if she'd hated the place, and she quickly found her way to the local McDonald's, ten minutes walk away. When I got in from work this morning, though, it was immediately apparent that there were issues that needed to be addressed, so, when K eventually dragged herself out of bed at 11:30, address them I did. Anyone who knows me will be aware that I'm not some kind of obsessive 'neat freak', but I'd already made it clear to K that I have no ambition at all to live in squalor, so to find K's crockery and sundries just dumped in the kitchen sink didn't go down well at all. To some extent, it was a case of K inadvertently hitting a raw nerve, because I spent more years than I care to recall tidying up after her mother, but, as (I hope) I made abundantly clear to K this morning, I have no intention of going back to being a skivvy. It all ended amicably, with K saying she wants our household to work as much as I do, and with our sharing a hug. My girl went back to Cornwall early this afternoon, because she wanted to sort her room out preparatory to a friend of hers staying over, and I've just spoken to her to confirm she'd got back in one piece, and that we're still friends, which seems to be the case, so all's well that ends well, as cliché-mongers like me tend to say!

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Unexpected, but very welcome

It looks like I'm going to see K earlier than expected - she's planning to come up to London tomorrow to meet up with a friend, and the way things have panned out, she'll probably stay at the flat overnight. I'm then off on Monday, so we'll be able to spend a few hours together, have lunch somewhere and generally catch up before she heads back some time in the afternoon. None of this was in the offing until 4:00 this afternoon, but, needless to say, I'm certainly not complaining - any time spent with my girl is quality time, as far as I'm concerned.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Circular bureaucracy

Amongst the other things I had to do in connection with moving into the flat, I had to advise the various utility providers that I'd taken over the tenancy, and, of course, responsibility for the relevant bills. In the way of such things these days, much of what might have been paperwork a few years back has been done online, and it all seemed to have gone well enough. Except, apparently, for my water provider. I filled in their online form, submitted it, received two e-mails back, a copy of the form, and a standard 'letter' saying that a 'customer advisor' would contact me within five working days. That was two and a half weeks ago, so I e-mailed them again yesterday to try and find out what was going on. My reply was, surprise, surprise, another copy of the same standard e-mail saying a customer advisor would contact me within five working days. Looks like I'm trapped in a bureaucratic tunnel with no beginning and no end!
I came back from work by way of another public transport permutation this morning, to take in a shopping trip to my local-ish supermarket en route, and was confronted by a bit of a 'blast from the past', or, at least, a reminder of someone I'd almost forgotten. I was passing a school on the bus route between the station and the supermarket where some boys were engaged in a pre-lessons football kickabout. One of them, maybe 13 or so, was not just stunning in his own right - long blond hair, good looking, athletic - but, I realised after a second or two, very reminiscent of the gorgeous boy who lived in the house behind us in Cornwall (the one with the controversial bedroom window, if anyone remembers a few exchanges with self-appointed moral guardians, who accused me of being a peeping tom, as though I could peep into a window fifteen feet higher than the back of our house). More bittersweetness, really - a reminder of a person I'd have given my eye teeth to have known better, a reminder of home (Cornwall is still home, as far as I'm concerned, though whether I'll ever live there again is, to say the least, doubtful), a reminder of what I want and can never have. All a bit much to cope with when you're already overtired at the end of a very long night. I didn't exactly go to bed feeling lighthearted this morning.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Out of circulation

It's going to be that kind of week, because nights have rolled around again - in the face of 9½ hour shifts at work, and 3+ hours travelling, there isn't much time for anything else beyond getting some sleep and getting ready to go and do it all again. All the more galling, then, that the first day of April has been greeted with some really nice weather, warm and sunny. Just the sort of afternoon when 'cutie time', my meandering in the hour or two at the end of the school day, might have provided a more than average dose of eye candy. Still, never mind - the Easter holidays start at the end of this week, and I'll be off for at least six days of the just over two week break. Some recompense for 'losing' a week of my life, maybe!

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B