…and I suppose I should explain where I’ve been. The truth is, I didn’t plan on blogging again. After the usual Christmas Eve post in December 2023, I figured I’d eventually let our hosting expire and retire this blog. I hadn’t felt compelled to write anything following the conclusion of my “Dead Friendship” story; while “Dead Friendship” was deeply personal and I needed to get it off of my chest, to some extent I only wrote and published it because every year going back to 2015 I’d written a long multi-part saga. I think I felt obligated to write something to keep the streak going, if not for its own sake.

The six parts of “Dead Friendship” and the aforementioned Christmas Eve photo were all that I posted that year. The previous year we published seventeen posts, the highest number since 2018, which saw fifteen posts published. That’s a lot, but still a far cry from our heyday of 2012, when we posted a total of – holy shit! – 477 posts.

The writing has been on the wall for a long time: This blog is on a serious decline. There are a lot of reasons for this, though the most obvious one is that I just haven’t felt inspired. I haven’t really felt sexy either, and since its inception this has always been a sex blog. Sure, we’ve published posts that aren’t inherently sexual – posts about politics, pop culture, and random thoughts – but our identities and the blog itself were tied very closely to sex. Related to my previous point, for many years I haven’t felt connected to the community of sex bloggers, some of whom we’ve followed for many years. I’ve felt removed from most of my mutuals on Twitter and now Bluesky. But the main reason this blog stalled is that I simply didn’t feel inspired to contribute to it.

I’ve done a lot of writing over the past couple years, so it’s not that I’m in a creative slump or anything (though now that I think of it, I certainly could have been more productive than I actually have been). But the writing I’ve done has been far less personal than the average piece of writing I’ve published to this blog. I’ve got three long-form works-in-progress, multiple short stories also in progress, and numerous ideas that exist solely as notes on a word processing document. Actually finishing a writing project has never been my strong suit – perhaps I will someday use this blog to examine the reasons why – so I guess it speaks volumes about me that I not only finished so many blog posts over the years, but actually released them to the general public to be consumed and judged.

While I did plan to retire from the world of sex blogging when my hosting expired in March, certain developments over the last six months or so made me briefly toy with the idea of continuing. I liked the idea of using this blog to express what’s been going on in my life, not necessarily for the purpose of letting others read it but simply because I needed to get the words out. It was an appealing idea. But then I decided that I couldn’t justify the expenditure, and at any rate, I’d already made up my mind that I was done.

There was just one problem: My hosting actually expired in February, and I didn’t realize it until my hosting company charged me for another two years. So I guess I’m back. I’m not sure what this blog will be going forward – expect a mishmash of introspective writing about the state of my life, posts about my mental health, and presumably some sexual musings and thirst traps when the mood strikes – but I guess I’ll figure it out as I go.

– Jack