Sitting in a coffee shop, listening to OMD.

[Press play on the video above to listen to the soundtrack for this post. The song has nothing to do with the post, but I love it, and it was what was playing while I wrote much of this post.]

Why do I write this blog? I’ve written on the subject before, but one of my favorite things to do is to revisit previous topics at a different moment in time, from a different vantage point.

Lots of reasons.

Sometimes, I write it to get me hard. Sometimes, to write about what happened while I was hard. I’m an exhibitionist – it makes me feel good for you to see my hard-ons, to know what I do with them, what you do with them.

Sometimes, I write it to work through things I’m thinking about. I can do this in my journal, and I often do. Or on another blog (I have several). But this is the only one with much of an audience, so if there’s value to my thoughts being seen, reacted to, by others, then this is the place toward which I gravitate.

Sometimes, I write it because I’m proud, and I want to share my pride. Sometimes, because I’m ambivalent, or even ashamed, and I want to medicate my negative feelings with sunlight. Which always – ALWAYS – helps me.

Sometimes, I write it because I think it’s Important, in some capital-I sense, that what I write be “out there.”

I think I’ve written before that I had a writing teacher in college who said, “If you don’t think, as you’re writing, ‘You lucky bastards get to read what I have to say!’, then you have no business writing.” And there’s that: I think that, often.

I’m not a believer in much of the conventional wisdom around sex, love, and relationships. It just isn’t supported by my own experience, or by that of anyone I really know well. And I think there’s value to be had in people seeing those bits of conventional wisdom upended, challenged, by thoughtful people with integrity living in opposition to, disregard of, or at least, outside the bounds of, that conventional wisdom.

And then there’s another thing: sometimes, what I write resonates for readers. It normalizes their experience, they see themselves in me, or they see some part of themselves, at some point in time, in some part of the me I’ve presented here, at some point in my trajectory. When this happens, it doesn’t make my cock hard, but it does give my heart and mind the equivalent of a hard-on – a sort of intellectual, emotional hard-on. If I had a nickel for every reader who sent me a private thank-you for helping them make sense of their own lives, I’d have a bunch of nickels. I don’t have those nickels, but I do have the mind and heart hard-ons, and I’m grateful to you for that, for them.

Related posts:

  1. My friend
  2. Why i write sex (part 2, after a fashion)
  3. How to successfully write a secret sex blog and not blow up your life or be a total dick – a manual
  4. So much to write, so little time