Whew!

As you may have deduced, the awful fog of S.A.D. is starting to lift and I'm getting back into my old groove again, including resuming work on this very blog from time to time. (I am under no illusion that I will ever be a daily poster for more than a couple of days at a time--I'm just not built for that.) And part of that work has included adding tags/labels for every single entry up to now, all the way back to April 2003. (Good thing I don't write here that often, or that would have taken months instead of three short evening sessions.)

It has been instructive to look back at earlier entries--haven't reread too many in detail, but I can still detect themes I explored for a while, then dropped, others that I meant to cover from the start but didn't get around to until much later, etc. When I do get around to writing here, it's at least true that I've stuck fairly close to my original intent and purpose for the blog.

I've met (in the virtual sense, that is) a lot of men as a result of writing so obsessively about my own obsessions here--I've met men who share them, that is, and that's pretty cool. By now I"m even blasé about it ("Yep, here's another one..."), which is remarkable given that as recently as a decade ago I thought I was a freak of nature for fantasizing about the stuff I routinely fantasize about.

It also occurred to me the other night that, far from "outgrowing" my adolescent superhero fetish, I've actually developed a rich fantasy life that indulges them on a fairly regular basis, both in the flesh and in the virtual realm. (I realize I haven't written here in a long time about my online roleplaying colleagues, so here's a quick update:) I still look to the Monk with the highest of regard, as my greatest teacher, even my Master in the pedagogical sense, although he and I haven't really extended our storyline in any significant way for perhaps a year now. He refers to this as my having "plateaued," and I think we both look forward to moving past that somehow, some day. In the meantime, I've got at least three fairly new ongoing "cases" involving villains I don't think I've even mentioned here. I've lost touch with some wonderful old friends, and some equally wonderful old enemies, but new ones come into play fairly regularly, and it's always great to reconnect with the estranged ones, too. In short, my bat-life is a lot like that of the comic-book Batman, who battles a mix of longstanding nemeses and Johnny-come-latelies, some of whom stick around and some of whom vanish after a single encounter. One major change is that I'm less interested in sticking to a single "continuity," as the comics geeks would say, than I was during the early stages of the Monk saga. His story overshadowed and interconnected with all the others; now I've got three or more storylines that don't intersect at all, and none of them involve M.

Most of my roleplay activities, and most everything else that I normally find energizing, was on hold for months while I just struggled against the urge to stay in bed for days on end. (Never actually DID stay there that long; just wanted to.) But, as I say, I'm getting my old self back, I think and hope, and it feels great to be alive again, as both Bruce Wayne and the Bat.

Hit me with your best shot

OK, I hate the fact that I am in my own teeny tiny way helping a major ad campaign go viral, but what the hell, I love this commercial:



Grab a pillow and cop-u-late!

Batbeef, Spider-Meat, and more

1. Thanks, [P-Mod Barney], for tipping me off to this hunky bit of bat-beefcake (er, make that butt-cake):



2. Thanks, Man's Adventure, for tipping me off to Antebellum Gallery's upcoming ToonFetish exhibition. Antebellum bills itself as "the only fetish art gallery in america!" (but didn't the artist Hudson do something like this in NYC in the early 90s?) and I certainly want to revisit the site--and ideally the brick-and-mortar gallery--as often as possible.

3. The Hub and I saw Spider-Man III last weekend. I was kind of dreading it, since I am apparently one of the minority who found the second installment unbearably slow, and one of my coworkers had warned me Part III was even longer and more soap-operaish and featured Spidey even less than that one. Glad I lowered my expectations, because I ended up pleasantly surprised. Yes, it was long and no, I really, truly would not give a shit about Peter Parker, Bruce Waye, Clark Kent, or the rest of their ilk if they didn't also lead double lives as sexily costumed crimefighters. But I was pleasantly surprised by the new movie, which is to say I found the black spidersuit really hot (especially when wet!) and the wee bits of spider-bondage titillating, and so on. The Hub, whose taste in men is roughly the exact opposite of mine, was sufficiently pleased by the presence of young Toby, Topher, and especially pouty-lipped Mr. Franco.

I will spare you the rest of my thoughts on the film, except to say that I think the whole megabudget superhero epic is pretty much played out by this point. Wouldn't it be refreshing if someone would make a simple, cheap, little indie movie about a guy who puts on weird clothes and fights bad guys? And, since I'm clearly delusional here, wouldn't it be lovely if said film were not an origin story but rather a tale that takes for granted the hero's backstory and simply follows his latest adventure, much as the average comic book and/or graphic novel does?

Anybody with me on this?

Look who's back

I know you've probably given up on me months ago, but here I am again, ready to leap--or perhaps crawl--back into the blogosphere and pick up where I left off. If you've been here before, you'll notice that I've finally bitten the bullet and upgraded to the new version of Blogger, something everybody else did half a year ago. I found the update a huge pain in the ass when I tried it elsewhere and avoided doing it here as long as possible. Still, this should make the link list a lot easier to navigate, among other things.

Enough shoptalk. Where the hell have I been, you may be wondering. And the answer is: concentrating on life in the daylight/B. Wayne world for the last few months, battling a few new villains in the bat-world, and so on.

Mainly, though, I've been having a fairly miserable winter. The older I get, the worse my semi-annual bouts with Seasonal Affective Disorder seem to grow. After a very happy and productive autumn, my body and mind just sort of shut down, as they are sometimes wont to do from January through April or so--not every year, but often enough. It's weird how closeted I am about depression in my day-to-day life, and even online; only the Hub, my shrink, and a handful of close friends know what I've been going through for the last four months. It occured to me a while back that since I write so openly here about my innermost fantasies,which are potentially far more incriminating, I could also blog a bit about what my psyche has been going through (with the same goal of letting similarly-wired readers know they're not alone)--but then I've just been so fucking depressed that I haven't been able to follow through until now. In fact, I haven't been able to do much more than sleep late, nap, go to bed early, and accomplish the bare minimum at my day job for weeks and weeks and weeks. The batsuit went unused for months, along with this blog and most other evidence of my bat-life. I'm not totally out of the darkness just yet, but I feel myself getting a little more energy as the sun stays out longer and longer. (Perhaps my archetypal comic book hero is not Batman, the Dark Knight, but Apollo, who draws his power from sunlight.)

I've been accumulating all sorts of things to write about here, and I have a lot of catching up to do. (I've also got a few ideas for how to jumpstart Beginnings again, too, so stay tuned.) If you're reading this, thanks for not giving up on me. I've tried hard not to give up on myself (tempting though that may be when I wake up several hours before I want to, my mind fully ready to go on the attack), and I'm looking forward to getting back into the groove again at long last.