What's the difference?

Using someone's dreams and aspirations as a means of manipulating them to submit to your desires, to facilitate your gratification.
Giving someone you care about, and who has consented, as much pleasure as you can, because you want them to have the best you can give.
What's the difference? None at all, in the perception of 'right-thinking' people, where relationships with boys are concerned. Because anyone who desires boys is self-evidently predatory and evil.
Sorry, but I believe there is a difference. If what you want is the most important thing, then there's a strong likelihood that you're a child molester. If what the boy wants is the most important thing, then, maybe, you might be a boylover.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

How much longer?

How much longer, that is, can I justify keeping this blog, and Nephelokokkygia, for that matter, going? In the face of another 'historic sexual abuse scandal', this time around youth football, and the lurch towards right-wing, if not undisguisedly fascistic politics that seems to be rife at the moment, being a self-confessed boylover, even pseudonymously, seems likely to become an even more untenable position than it has been hitherto. Because there's nothing more that fascists love than a convenient scapegoat. I like to think that I'm not a coward, but there is a line between courage and recklessness. I really need to seriously assess which side of that line my staying in cyberspace will place me.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Almost to the point of insanity

I've written often enough about the torturous nature of my life, but there are occasions when it all seems gratuitously cruel. A few days ago, I spent hours while I was meandering thinking about Cammy, only to be 'ambushed' at a bus stop by a boy who looked hauntingly like DBJ. Then at lunchtime today, as I was out and about again, I found myself close to being washed away by a tsunami of hopelessly unrequitable desire for a quite exquisite 'skater boy' who got on the bus I was on, 13/14, blond, dimples framing a mischievous smile, as close to irresistibility as I could imagine or invent. When he got off, fifteen minutes or so later, I simply felt like crying, unshed tears of frustration and absence of fulfillment. Torture is hardly a strong enough word for it.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Fascists and dominionists, oh my

Two weeks into the 'transition', and Trump is filling his government-in-waiting with a selection of neo-Nazis, Christofascists and one-percenters. And suggesting that Farage - Nigel fucking Farage - would be an ideal candidate for British ambassador to the US. If the effects of this insanity were confined to their country of origin, all well and good. But the old adage about America sneezing, and the world catching a cold has never been more apposite, as far as I'm concerned. Or more frightening.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

End of the weekend, and an unwelcome guest

This weekend has been the centrepiece of my time off, because K has been home and not otherwise engaged, so I've had my girl's undivided attention for a couple of days. She's on her way back to 'uni-town' now, though, so it's back to 'me, myself, I' for another month, until the university term finishes. The time with her, and the associated reminder of the justification of my still being on the treadmill, has certainly been very welcome.
Not at all welcome, though, was the news today that Trump has apparently been invited for a state visit to the UK next summer. The thought of such a vile twat riding in state through the place where I live is positively nauseating. I'd say he should fuck off and die, except that would mean President Pence, which would be even worse.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

In need of inspiration

Given the waves of apathy my posts in this blog are largely met with, I've begun to feel the need for something with a bit more 'job satisfaction'. And, not for the first time, my thoughts have turned towards producing something substantive in Nephelokokkygia. There are all sorts of drafts over there, even stuff that is plotted as far as its denouement, but what I think is necessary is something along the lines of Alexandrine, a story that really catches my imagination and gives me the incentive to put in the hours of work required to come up with something worthwhile. Will it happen? Don't hold your breath in anticipation.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Frittering

Today is the first of eleven days off that I've managed to engineer, wrapping my six remaining annual leave days for this year around one of my all too rare long weekends (two in our thirty week roster cycle, don't spend them all at once!). So what do I do with this first day, a mild and sunny one for this time of year? Nothing. I simply couldn't get motivated this morning, doing no more than slobbing around in the flat, and when I did finally get showered and out of the front door, I came straight to the pub, where I still am. R and R is worthwhile, but the privilege can certainly be abused. Mea culpa.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Monologues

There have been quite a few lately, in my head, rehearsing my side of conversations I might potentially have with friends, colleagues, anyone really. Conversations about me and my life, past, present and future, who I am, how I've come to be that person, how that 'who and how' relates to the world at large. There was a good example this morning, as I was in the shower getting ready to go to work. My mind found its way to DBJ, from my first sight of him as a pretty nine year old passing my former Cornish workplace with his family through to the last few times I saw him before my move to my present job, when he was 13, going on 14, and, in my eyes, the most beautiful boy in the history of the world. How I might describe him, how I could explain my reactions to him, in so far as I understand them myself. Words are always inadequate for such descriptions and explanations, it seems to me, because they are, for the reader, if not the writer, disconnected from the emotions of the real situation. How I saw him, the feelings he engendered, are unique to me. And in a more general sense, if you've never loved a boy, how can you possibly understand how a boylover feels? We're all prisoners of our own psyches, ultimately unable, by definition, to see the world through anyone's eyes but our own. Always, as Petra says in The Chrysalids, 'one at a times'. Trapped forever in a well of loneliness.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

A quarter of a century ago

I met my ex. 25 years ago today, November 12 1991, at 9:05 in the evening, in a pub in Greater Manchester. I fell in love with her in a matter of days, proposed to her less than four months later, married her fourteen months after that. I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her. But it wasn't to be. In fact, it was probably the worst mistake of my whole life, and there are many candidates for that accolade. I thought she was the one to save me from myself, and fooled myself accordingly. But, ultimately, the one person you can never fool, for any length of time, anyway, is yourself. There is K, of course, so it hasn't been a complete disaster, but, my daughter apart, when I ask myself the question 'would I rather have never been in that pub on that fateful night?', the answer, I’m afraid, has to be 'yes'.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

With the benefit of a couple of days of reflection....

....I still think the election of Trump is the most stupid, self-destructive thing any electorate has done in my lifetime. And the fallout has begun already, with numerous reports, as in the aftermath of the Brexit vote, of naked bigotry, particularly racist bigotry, and even violence against those perceived as 'the other'. And plenty of gloating from those who now consider themselves to be the 'chosen ones', which, in Trumpland, basically means straight, white, Christian (however nominally, eh, Donald?) males. If you don't fall into that demographic, you're at best a second-class citizen, and at worst concentration camp fodder. Good luck, America, making it through to the next election. If there is a next election.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

You fucking morons

Brilliant, just brilliant, America. You've signed your own death warrant, and the rest of ours as well. And underlined the perennial problem with democracy - that any fucking idiot can vote. President Trump. You should be fucking ashamed of yourselves.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Disbelief

On the eve of the US presidential election, I simply can't understand why Trump is still seen as having any sort of a chance of winning, but it appears to be a possibility, even now. Irrespective of his policies - assuming that the disconnected word salad that issues forth whenever he opens his mouth are worthy of that honourific - he is, as far as I'm concerned, the most unsuited candidate, temperamentally, for the most powerful political office in the world that I've ever seen, almost the most unsuited I could imagine. Plenty of parallels have been drawn between Trump and Hitler during both the primary and presidential campaigns, but I've only seen one reference to a much closer likeness, to my mind - Mussolini. Trump seems to be exactly the same kind of puffed-up, preening buffoon as his Italian predecessor, but with one terrifying difference - Mussolini didn't have the world's most powerful military at his disposal. If the unthinkable happens, and the world wakes to President Trump on Wednesday morning, it might very well be a case of life imitating the words of Ford Prefect in The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - 'Drink up, the world's about to end'.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Green-eyed monstrosity

A comment at work this morning, by my friend, our shift manager, at that, left me almost weeping with frustration. He, no doubt, thought it a mere throwaway, as he mentioned that his older son was off visiting his long-distance girlfriend (they met on holiday earlier this year, and she lives 200+ miles north of London), and what they might get up to. If I'm being honest, my feelings weren't anything other than jealousy - not towards the boy (who, in all honesty, is pretty much a young man now, 16 in three months time and right at the very top end of my AoA) but towards the girl for being with the sort of person I'd give my eye teeth for. Once I'd calmed down and stopped gritting my teeth, it didn't take long to realise the futility of it all  - there wouldn't the slightest chance of the boy being with me even if he was exclusively gay, but, more than that, there is hardly any chance beyond the infinitesimal that any boy would ever be with me. As I've said more than once before, 'never' is the most terrifying word in the dictionary. But 'never' is very, very close to being what I have to live with. Forever.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B