Some dark and some light

It's been one of those mixed weekends. Friday wasn't good at all - it didn't begin too badly, outing and abouting in some sunny weather, but, for no particularly good reason, I soon descended into a real trough. Cammy was, I guess, part of the issue, as it occurred to me that it was eight months to the day since I'd last seen the boy, the Friday of the weekend that my old local closed. There was nothing even close to a relationship there, more's the pity,  just a few smiles and waves, but I still miss him, far more than I should. Yesterday morning was little better, initially - I was expecting to hear from K about her possible visit to the big city, but by almost midday the silence was deafening, and the paranoia was kicking in, thoughts of her turning against me beginning to roil around in my head. But then the text arrived, she was on a train and on her way. Ninety minutes or so later, I met her at Waterloo and the good bit of the weekend began. We had a late lunch, albeit 'street food' rather than sit down, before heading back to the flat so that my girl could pick up a few odds and ends. Amongst the conversation, she imparted a piece of thoroughly good news, as far as I'm concerned - she's going to be spending Christmas with me, something that was previously undecided. Call me selfish, but I can't help but be pleased that she's going to see her mother in the period leading up to the 'big day' before returning home on Christmas Eve. That little oasis only lasted three and a half hours, or thereabouts, before K headed back to 'uni-town' for a social in the evening, but it did leave me feeling far more at one with the world. Today has once more tended towards the downside - it was very grey, dank and misty for the most part, but even more depressingly, it was the day the clocks went back, so that it was dark by 5:00. Winter is here again, and no mistake.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Sometimes the brainwashing works

I did, ultimately, drag myself into the outside world earlier on, leaving the flat just after midday. Ninety minutes or so later, I was on a fairly busy single-decker bus, but one with a few seats available, including the one next to me and the equivalent seat on the opposite side of the aisle. Two young girls, 11/12-ish, of South Asian extraction, joined the bus, and looked around for seats. The slightly smaller, and perhaps slightly younger girl had no hesitation in sitting down beside me, but her friend, with a note of panic in her voice that was almost palpable, refused to sit in the seat opposite, saying 'I can't sit next to a stranger!'. The irony was that the person she would've been sitting next to was a middle-aged Afro-Caribbean woman, hardly a 'high-risk' seatmate for a girl of her age, even if there hadn't been a busload of people and four (yes, I counted them) CCTV cameras recording everything that was going on. There's nothing wrong with instilling caution in children, after all, my ex and I did just that with K when she was younger, but to hammer the message to the point that the girl was terrified in what can't be described as anything other than a safe situation can't possibly be proportionate. Or healthy.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Vacillation

The middle morning of my week off, and I find myself unable to decide what to do. I don't really want to stay in, because I can't see myself doing anything in the least constructive if I did, but, on the other hand, going out isn't exactly an attractive option either - the weather is dull, grey and miserable, I'm tired and still full of cold, as well as being faced with the perennial dilemma of half-term eye candy, whether the pleasure of seeing the numbers of cuties I have so far this week outweighs the depressive effect of knowing that they're all out of reach. Oh well, I guess I'll drink my coffee, faff around on the computer a bit longer and try desperately to come to some sort of decision before it starts getting dark.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Oasis in the quagmire

If that isn't a contradiction in terms. The quagmire, or the latest one, at least, has been mostly around my health, or lack of it - if sniffling, coughing and spluttering was an Olympic sport, I'd be straight in the team - but my mood wasn't helped last night by a raging bigot, racist, xenophobic, misogynistic, homophobic, the whole nine yards, who dumped his vile self a couple of tables away from me in the pub and proceeded to express his views loudly for a good hour, and was still doing so when I left. The temptation to ram a beer glass down his throat was close to irresistibility. The oasis, though, was a thoroughly pleasant one, five hours and more of quality time with my girl as I visited her in 'uni-town'. Her company is one of the few rays of light in my life, and, unaccountably, she seems to enjoy our connection just as much. I might actually see her again as soon as Saturday, as she's got provisional plans to come up to town during the day, although any time together would be decidedly briefer than yesterday, because she's got a social back on the coast in the evening. Any crumbs of comfort will be gratefully accepted, though.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

It can't be a coincidence

First day of a week's leave, and, surprise, surprise, I'm full of cold. I know my immune system is shot to pieces after my pneumonia three years or so ago, and that I'm prone to picking up any bug that's going around, but the regularity of my being ill to a greater or lesser extent when I take time off suggests to me that there's a common factor. Maybe there's a psychosomatic element, the conscious knowledge that I don't have to go to work feeding back into a subconscious feeling that it doesn't matter so much if I succumb. Whatever the reason, it's a thoroughgoing pain in the arse.
Notwithstanding my iffy health, though, I have been out and about today, encouraged in that regard by the fact that it's half term this week. And, right on cue, it's been 'blond cutie' day. There were three or four groan-inducing lovelies on my travels, but the 'arch-cutie' of the day was a little guy crossing a North London road, with his mother, in the opposite direction to me, at around midday. He was, quite frankly, flat out gorgeous, even if he was too young to do more than sigh over. One of these days, I'm going to be found, on some London street or other, as a puddle of lachrymose mush in the face of such beauty.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Infinitesimals

I've just found the dates for godheadSilo's 2017 tour. The nearest to where I am that they're playing is New York, so the chances of my seeing them are not good. Another date on the tour has even more of a frisson, though, because it's close to the home town of the friend who introduced me to the band in the first place. The daydream that engendered, though, is numerous orders of magnitude less likely than winning the lottery.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Degrees of separation

I had a dream in the early hours of this morning, of my being on some sort of day trip to a seaside place, then getting on a coach to head back to wherever my 'dreamworld home' was supposed to be. And cuddling into my side on that coach was a lovely boy, blond, 10/11, wearing a Chelsea football shirt. No-one I consciously recognised, though, in the moments after my alarm brought the tableau to a crashingly abrupt end. Something nagged at the back of my mind, though, and was still doing so an hour or so later as I sat on the tube at my local station, waiting for it to depart on the first leg of my journey to work. Then it clicked. The boy in my dream bore a strong resemblance to a boy I've written about before, the victim of an awful crime, decades ago, being raped and murdered by a family friend. The shock of recognition made me feel physically sick, not just because of the heartbreaking horror of his fate, but because I know how few degrees of separation there are between me and the perpetrator of that crime. I can talk all I want, in hypothetical terms, about how anathema rape is to me, how I never want to hurt a boy, how I could never do such a thing, but hypothetical is all those assertions are. If I'd been in that attic, that day so many years ago, could I have resisted the temptation the rapist failed to resist? Not knowing the answer to that question is one of the most torturous enigmas of my whole benighted life.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Wouldn't it be better?

A document, apparently a guidance briefing for managers in our company, appeared at work this morning. It probably wasn't meant for the eyes of us 'foot soldiers', but someone had evidently found it on our 'intranet' and printed it out. The guidance was on how to cope with issues raised by transgender employees. Needless to say, it was raw meat for the fuckwits, especially the 'archbigot', who made no effort to disguise his scorn at the idea that the company should even have thought of producing such guidance, still less implement it. Much later in the shift, our one openly gay guy, who has now completed his training and has become a member of my regular 'gang', the colleagues I work with most of the time, glanced at it and said 'wouldn't it just be better to treat everyone the same?'. 'Would that it was as simple as that' was my immediate reaction - of course it would be better if everyone was grown up enough to follow a 'people are people' mantra, but I'm sure he would know from extensive personal experience that many, if not most of those in our industry are distant strangers to tolerance and equality. And that's towards someone like him, who's a fairly 'moderate' example of an alternative lifestyle, with a long-term partner and a mortgage. I know, from the cesspit of bigotry I wallow in on almost a daily basis, that any trans person who was unfortunate enough to end up working with most of the people I work with would have their lives made a misery. As, of course, would I, if I was careless enough to be 'outed'.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Another in my long and lengthening....

....series of abject failures. I've chanced to re-read some of my posts from 18 months or so ago referring to my propensity towards 'self-censorship', and how, if I were to continue blogging, it wouldn't happen again - say what you think, or don't say anything. What a pathetic effort I've made to live up to that aspiration. Without exaggeration, almost every day sees me ranting inwardly about this, that or the other subject about which I disagree with 'society', but how often do I commit those thoughts to cyberspace? Virtually never. Who and what, exactly, am I afraid of? Given my freely admitted status as a boylover, most people are going to hate me anyway, so what have I got to lose? Maybe my cowardice could be excused in the face of the opprobrium aimed in the direction of those like me, but I can never excuse myself on those grounds. I should be more determined, not less, to 'have my say' in the face of the world's disapproval, but I simply don't seem to be able to do it. 'Don't let the bastards grind you down' might be an admirable aim - if you can manage it.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Sums up my workplace perfectly

After a day when I've been close to being driven out of my mind by an avalanche of cuties, I tripped over something, 100% accidentally, on YouTube that brought me home grinning, a very rare occurrence. It's not often a song fits so well with a situation, but this one matches my workplace, or, more to the point, all too many of my colleagues to a 'T'. I present to you Fuckwit City.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

It never gets any easier

And nor will writing about it, yet again, change anything. But I'm going to write, all the same. The lovely boys I see, as I stumble through the days of my benighted life, so close, close enough to touch, but always, always out of reach. It tears me up inside, every time. No, I don't want to have sex with all of them, or even close to that. I want to be friends, to be around them, to talk about their interests and doings, maybe get lucky enough to get an arm around the shoulder, or even a hug. That would be more than enough. But even that degree of connection seems as unlikely as my flying to the moon. How much longer can I bear this torturous lifestyle of mine? It's an open question.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Tables turned?

I had a rather odd encounter on the way back from work this evening, maybe an 'inverse ghost' moment. I got onto a busyish tube, making a beeline for a vacant seat in the corner of the carriage. In doing so, I had to step around a youngish Asian guy, maybe in his early/mid twenties, who moved his bags from the seat between the one he was occupying and the one I was aiming at, for which I thanked him. He then proceeded, for the three stops our itineraries coincided, to spend a lot of time looking my way, before smiling at me as he got off of the train, and even looking back as the train moved off, smiling again. He was perhaps ten years too old for my tastes, albeit not at all difficult to look at, but the fact of his attention gave me, possibly, an insight into how the boys I find so irresistible could feel if and when they become aware of my scrutiny. It was, as best I can describe it, a mixture of flattery and trepidation. Very strange, and no mistake.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Implosions

Potentially a good end to a pretty good week - after the UKIP pantomime a few days ago, it now seems that Trump's presidential campaign is going down the tubes after a tape of him saying some thoroughly egregious things about women came to light. Despite the fact that Clinton is unpleasant enough in her own right, such unpleasantness pales into insignificance compared to the frankly terrifying prospect of Trump as the most powerful person on Earth.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

I should keep my mind shut

As I was waiting at the bus stop outside the flat this morning, awaiting the first stage of my journey to work, I looked up and down a road that was more or less devoid of any pedestrians, never mind eye candy, and mused 'where are my Saturday cuties?'. As they say, careful what you wish for, because, beginning less than ten minutes later, I was positively swarmed with the delightful, but untouchable. Ironically, my time actually at work was the most difficult to cope with, because there was a boy there for most of my shift, a boy I've seen a few times before, the youngest son of one of my colleagues, who is now both growing up fast and obviously fairly bright with it. He's still too young, but getting a lot closer to my 'window of attraction' than when I first met him, and the fact that his father was working the position next to mine made for more than a few tricky moments as the afternoon progressed - avoiding saying or doing anything unequivocal while trying to concentrate on my own work was certainly a challenge. He wasn't cutie of the day, though - that accolade went to a skateboarder, one of a group of four at the station where I picked up the third link of my workbound itinerary. He was 12-ish, blond, perfect size and shape, in short the loveliest boy I've seen for weeks, if not months. And, of course, yet another 'ghost', almost certainly never to be seen again. C'est la guerre.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

A shaft of light

Only a small one, but it appears that the loathsome UKIP is imploding - their new leader resigned a couple of days ago after less than three weeks in charge, while today, one of the leading candidates to replace her has ended up in hospital after an alleged fistfight with one of his fellow UKIP MEPs. Rarely, if ever, certainly in British political history, would the demise of a political party be more welcome. Except, of course, that the Conservatives have taken most of UKIP’s policies onboard, repositioning themselves as the party of racism and xenophobia. Fascists, one and all.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Unbelievable

Over the past couple of days, the Tories have been holding their party conference, and a major theme appears to have been May and her cohorts trying to portray themselves as the new champions of the working class. Anyone, and especially any working class person, who believes such a claim is, as far as I'm concerned, a moron. The Tories have always been the party of the rich, by the rich and for the rich, and to hell with the rest. Like Trump, the only way they can engage with the hoi-polloi is by appealing to their racism and xenophobia. And such appeals, I suspect, will become ever more strident as the economy collapses into the abyss known as 'Brexit'. This country could become a very ugly place, in very short order.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

October

Already. Winter is nearly here, again. Four weeks today, the clocks go back, and we'll be drowned in dark evenings for months. And this on top of all the ongoing vicissitudes of my benighted life. Look on the bright side, people say. Would that there was such a thing in my situation.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B