Category: Blogging

Twelve hours later, we’re back up again. I was pouring over error logs from the hosting site and saw a suspicious “account suspended” script had run two days ago. That wouldn’t be the source of the outage, but it got me feeling a bit nervous. I’m paid up with not only hosting but also my domain name through the end of this year, but I stated looking for other adult-content-friendly hosts. Moving everything would be a major pain in the ass, but at least I know it can be done relatively painlessly if needed…

My hosting company is apparently having…issues. Images aren’t loading or are timing out. Sometimes the site is completely inaccessible.

This normally resolves on itself after a brief period, but it seems it’s hanging on  today like Trump’s fantasies of avoiding prison.

I think this is a sign I need to get off my ass and run the errands I need to do today.

I’m going to take a break from this here blog thingie for a while. I don’t know if it’s going to be a few days or a few weeks or until I get so bored I have to start posting again, but right now I’m just burnt out.

I originally started blogging in 2005 as a way of expressing my frustration at what was happening in the country with the Bush administration. Who could’ve possibly foreseen the hellscape that was going to manifest slightly more than a decade later, the effects of which we’re still wading through.

Obviously I’ve still used this medium to express my frustration with the direction the country is going, but it seems that every. damn. day. there is some outrage perpetrated by the right that’s more horrific than the day before…and I just can’t. There aren’t enough memes in the world to express what I’m feeling right now.

I still firmly believe that Democracy is going to win in this battle, but it’s not going to come through without a few broken bones and a black eye.

And that’s all I’m going to say for now.

Of course, watch me turn around and repost something cool I found online tomorrow…

Stay tuned.

I must take a moment in my frenetic posting schedule to extend hearty thanks to all my faithful readers and those from whom I have unabashedly stolen copious amounts of material: SickoRicko, Workmen and Rednecks, Diary of a Fat Slob, Fearsome Beard, Infidel 753, and the countless Tumblr and Reddit accounts from whom I have absconded and sometimes repurposed.

You are all appreciated!

To my Subscribers:

I’m busy re-posting items from the version of Voenix Rising that I deleted prior to moving to Denver via The Wayback Machine, so if you get email notifications of new posts, they aren’t actually new…they’re just…rediscovered.

Because I’ve got nothing better to do. Like cataloging my vinyl collection.

I get a lot of referrals from http://andyroo2u.blogspot.com/

I would love to see your blog, but it’s by invitation only…

I bought this for one purpose: to liven things up around here at Voenix Rising. I’m going to start posing questions that were provided as food-for-thought in this book. Participation is not required, but it might be fun for y’all to vent anonymously…

Want your own copy? Get one here.

Apologies to any of my readers who have left comments over the past few weeks only to never see them appear. Apparently the WordPress spam filter got a little too excited in its quest for my protection.

I’ve moved all the comments out of spam that shouldn’t have been there and allowed them to post, but if in the future you notice that a comment you left never appears, let me know via email and I will look into it.

That being said, I’ll also keep a closer eye on that damn filter!

Always a risk…

*bonus points if you get the reference in the title

I started keeping a Journal in the late 80s, shortly after I moved to San Francisco. (I may have told this story before, so if it sounds familiar, forgive me.) I did this shortly after seeing Prick Up Your Ears, where the protagonist journaled incessantly. It inspired me to document my adventures in The City—both lascivious and otherwise—because I knew at some point memories were going to fade and what better way of pinpointing when events occurred than to have them recorded in real time?

(There are also diskettes hidden away in a wall of one of the apartments I lived in that contain the first few years of that Journal, although I’m sure they’ll be unreadable if and when anyone discovers them in the future.)

I kept the Journals up for over twenty years. At one point I had most of them printed out and bound, but I eventually shredded them, keeping only the electronic copies. Little did I realize at the time that the electronic copies would become increasingly difficult to access as file formats evolved. (WordPerfect, anyone?)

I’ve spent a lot of free time converting these file formats into the 21st Century, although I’m sure at some point they will become as difficult to access as the originals were—a fact I just realized while writing this.

Two things stand out while I’ve been doing the conversions. The first was how—for lack of a better word—lost I was before my cancer diagnosis forced a much overdue examination of my life. I spent a great deal of time “looking for love in all the wrong places,” and while the adventures were certainly fun, they were ultimately unable to fill the need that was driving me into these situations in the first place.

The second thing that stands out is how, despite recording the names and the details of my interactions with the men I dated, there are many—way too many, truth be told—names for whom I cannot conjure a face. Digital photography wasn’t a thing like it is today, so even though I was a rather prolific photographer, I often never got photos of the men I was dating.

I bitched about work a lot, although looking back on it now I didn’t realize how good I had it at the time. When you work at a small architectural firm with the same four people for nearly a decade, you become like a family—with all the positives and negatives that relationship confers.

My weight was another thing I obsessed over in my writings; something that didn’t really disappear from my life until after the cancer diagnosis and I came to simply embrace—and love—my body for what it was.

I stopped Journaling when I got the cancer diagnosis. I didn’t want my writing to turn into a pity-party as I was going through treatment (which it easily could have), and frankly, I was getting bored with it. I discovered blogging a couple years later and while it’s not quite the same thing as Journaling (especially of late), it’s fulfilled that need to express myself—even if it’s not as easy to look up when stuff happened since I don’t share everything.

Okay, so I dropped the ball on getting my menz all queued up this month. Please stand by, all you horny cock-hounds.

With the country shattering in front of my eyes, I think it’s time to step back for a while from this here blog thing. Right now I feel that anything I post will never adequately describe the sense of despair I—and people of conscience—are feeling right now, and posting anything silly, salacious, or light-hearted just seems out of place.

I have two more months of Days of UNF auto-posting, but except for those already in the pipeline I’m reasonably certain I’m going to suspend operations until all this madness plays itself out or withdrawal from blogging proves to be an insurmountable task. Whether that’s 24 hours, a few days, a few weeks, is anyone’s guess at this point.

I feel the same way about Instagram, my last remaining link to social media. That may also go silent for a while, because as I was scrolling through the images today I found myself asking more and more, “How can these idiots post photos of themselves at the beach or shoving their stuffed speedos in my face when the country is fucking burning around them?”

Peace.

I have this general sense that the majority of you who stop by here are near my age (plus or minus a decade), but I really have no idea. So, for curiosity’s sake…

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I appreciate you, my readers…even those of you who never leave comments.

I was having dinner last night with a friend whom I met fifteen or so years ago through blogging, and we were commenting on how few active bloggers still  remain from those days (my friend ironically being one of those who abandoned the medium years ago). Great times were had in the mid 00s. I mean, I probably never would’ve met Ben if we both hadn’t been blogging.

So again, I say thank you to all of those readers who have stuck with me and have endured my ramblings over the past decade and a half. I know it doesn’t seem like I actually write much these days (at least not the way I did in the beginning) because it seems there are so many other voices out there—far more knowledgeable on the topics I would write about that you should be reading.

Today I’ve all but thrown up my hands at the state of politics, and while my tirades early on in this blog helped relieve some of the frustration I’d been feeling with Bush Jr. (seems like a walk in the park now, doesn’t it?), screaming into the Void now is doing nothing to alleviate my deep fear that the Orange Russian Wig Stand currently occupying the White House will, through his arrogance and sociopathic narcissism bring about the end of civilization as we know it. Maybe that’s being overly dramatic and actually attributing way more power to him than he possesses or deserves, but my first thought upon waking every morning is, “We’re still here. The asshole didn’t start WWIII overnight.”

I could laugh him off as the clown he is if it weren’t for his obvious mental instability and the fact his finger is poised over the nuclear planetary reset button. My outlook for humanity surviving this century is growing bleaker with every day he is allowed to remain in the Oval Office, and there’s no reason for me to burden you any further with that kind of content when we’re all being bombarded with it from every direction already. Assuming we survive his occupation of the White House, it will take decades to repair the internal damage he’s wrought, not to mention our standing in the international community.

So please continue to come/cum for the menz and the other silly stuff I post. I mean, what else have you got to do?

I know several of you have asked about downloading my headers without having to right-click-save on each and every one of them. Want them all? Click on the image above to download a zip file (approx. 350MB) of all the images in the library (currently something like 600 or so), many of which you’ve probably never seen!

I’ve also added a permanent widget at the right of the screen in case you want to do this later.

The doggies don’t know it’s the weekend, so almost without fail they’re dancing on me at 5:30 am, wanting to go out. I can’t sleep in the way I used to when I was younger (last Sunday returning to bed after letting them out and sleeping until 2 pm was a very rare exception), but occasionally instead of immediately feeding them after they come back in we all head back to bed for another hour or two.

Most of the time, however, I stay up and utilize this quiet time (Ben can—and does—still easily sleep in on the weekends) to write or organize the week’s downloads accumulating on my computer, or post nekkid menz while the doggies sleep on the couch in the den beside me. These seem to be the few times during the week when I can actually focus and not be distracted by every shiny object that crosses my path.

Squirrel!

I get idea for posts at the weirdest times…as I’m falling asleep, in the shower, on my way to work…

And then totally space them when I actually sit down to write something.

In order to overcome this memory hole, I’ve started jotting them down in Notes on my phone as soon as safely possible after they pop into my head…

Where they’re again promptly forgotten.

I’m starting to think that’s actually a good thing, because when I go to add another note, I look at the blog ideas written there, remember what it was I was going to write about, and think, “Nah. That’s rubbish,” and post another meme or picture of a naked man.

I may get back to actually writing some day.

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