Christmas Eve has always been a relatively reflective time for me. Whether it’s the memory of my first time going to midnight mass or the earlier times, when I’d spend all night secretly asking Father Christmas for a kiss from whichever girl I had a crush on at the time… there’s always going to be a memory from way back when.
My earliest Christmas Eve memory is from when I was about seven or eight. I remember it specifically because I slept with my head out of the covers, and because I actually got a fair amount of sleep just before Christmas – a nigh-on impossible thing for a child.
Up until my late teens, I slept with my whole body – including my head – covered by the duvet. Anything else and I would feel vulnerable, or nervous, or scared… ever since I noticed how the rainbows on my Care Bears wallpaper made a scary face if you looked at them for too long, I felt I had to shield myself from the world. I didn’t even notice until the age of about five that it was possible to close one’s eyes without screwing them tightly together. The fact that I was able to go to sleep at all was a miracle. Doing so without problems on Christmas night was completely unheard of. And with my head out of the covers? Positively Herculean.
The reason I’m talking about this on my sex blog is because I find it difficult to relate Christmas to sex. I’m aware that there are plenty of people who do; it just doesn’t really occur to me. I don’t think, or I don’t remember, ever having had sex at Christmas. I’ve brought myself to orgasm all of once on the big day itself. I’m not really one to ask for, give, or receive sex toys as a gift, nor does anyone ever buy me porn.
Even though I haven’t lived with my parents now for years, whereas living with them made enjoying my sexuality risky, it still doesn’t occur to me to be at all sexy over Christmas. Christmas is for Jesus Christ, Father Christmas and Batman Returns. There are even some difficult bits related to it – once ending up with me in the mental health unit of the local hospital. What with everything going on, there genuinely doesn’t appear to be time for sex.
So if anyone has an explanation as to why I’ve spent the entire week constantly thinking about it, that’s be good. Cheers.
Worn down by strangers All you need’s a friend You’ve been worn down by strangers This is not the end This is the end
This weekend just gone, I spent some time travelling to and from Manchester. The reason I did so is relatively immaterial (although if you follow me onsocialmedia you may have seen an explanatory picture), but (rationale behind it notwithstanding) I was in Manchester, at least for a day, bookended by travels.
Maybe it’s kinder to breeze over the main leg of the journey (a train’s a train; neither were as comfortable as other journeys have been, but they would do), but getting through London was much more of an adventure – even though it looked very simple as the crow flies.
I’ve done this before, even when dragging a wheeled suitcase with me (as I was on Friday). Get on the Weaver line, transfer to the Victoria and up the escalator at Euston. It’s simple. It looks simple and it feels simple. Hell, I’ve been to Manchester enough times to know that it is simple. But it quickly became apparent to me that it is, suddenly, no longer simple.
Getting onto the train on the Weaver line required no less than three strangers offering me hands to push/pull me over the gap and onto the train. I was one inch from falling into the gap one is advised to mind on the Victoria line before a kindly stranger offered to take my case for me. No less than three times did I drop said case, once down an entire flight of stairs I was taking due to a broken escalator, and once on an escalator itself. Yet another stranger caught it deftly.
I even managed to injure my leg at one point by walking into something I really should have seen.
I got to Euston by a miracle, feeling a huge and uncomfortable combination of grateful and guilty. For the first time since diagnosis I genuinely felt ashamed of my disability, whether or not it inconvenienced a kindly stranger. Meeting my wife and continuing on our travails was fine, but for the entire time I was abundantly aware that I had been beholden to other citizens of London to have made my journey. They didn’t fail to do so, of course – around ever corner there was somebody ready to hold something, point a way, steady my balance, or offer generic, well-meaning help.
And if they hadn’t, I may well have seriously hurt myself. I certainly felt close to doing so more than a fair few times, and the way back from Manchester was particularly unpleasant, having to do most of this in reverse having picked up cramp and IBS pains along the way.
This is a new and unexpected complication. Up until now I have been rather blasé about having myotonic dystrophy. No longer being able to play a full-size guitar is something I am struggling with coming to terms with, but I can do that. Fine, the lift at work is broken; it’s painful getting up the stairs, but I can do that. Okay, I drop things a lot, including my mobility aid; my body screams in pain when I bend down to retrieve them, but I can do that.
But I am going to have to accept that, strangers or not being present, there are some things I can not do.
It is a sad fact that my alarm goes off at half past six in the morning, and even more so that I set three more – six forty-five, seven o’clock and a “you’re late!” sort of mockery at ten past. It’s my reminder to get up, pick up the first clothes that I see, make some sort of assemblage of myself and then go to join the milieu of drudging humanity.
As I was saying to my pretty colleague the other day, that’s the hard part. Once you’ve done that, the rest is easy.
I am, of course, awake well before those alarms go off. I’m not a good sleeper, as we all know, and I wake up with the slightest of disturbances. Sometimes this is for a good reason – midnight sex is always welcome, as is a 4am departure for a cross-country sojourn to Eroticon 2012 – but, sadly, the majority of times it is not. I merely wake up and then find it impossible to go back to sleep.
I’ve also been finding it difficult to be horny for the past few weeks. It’s been happening, of course (this is, after all, me we are talking about), but at the most inopportune of moments – while in the general mess of human society to which I am tethered, for example, or while in conversation with others, or at my table at work attempting to battle off the sleep that evaded me the previous night. It’s much less easy, for example, to suddenly be struck by arousal when sitting in my computer chair in an otherwise-empty flat. In that situation, as one can imagine, the blinds go down while bits of me go up, and there’s a rather efficacious conclusion to events.
But that’s not been happening either.
I’ve been getting horny in the early mornings. If I’m awake at five, or six, I’ll inevitably be doing so with a very noticeable version of morning wood (despite the fact that it is not, yet, the morning). I’m even finding it easier to remember the dreams which are getting me there – not exactly the traditional ‘wet dream’ (although I’ve had one of those in the past year, which only ever happened once in my teenage years), but close enough to. They’re not my usual rambunctious, plot-driven rollicking adventure stories either: just a short vignette with mainly sex.
It’s so unfair.
Do I sound ungrateful? Perhaps. In a way, I should be a little relieved that this happens; it shows that the important bits of me are functional and that I remain the sexual being I worked hard to become. It’s also possible that I shouldn’t be worrying about this in my late thirties and focusing more on such priorities as “getting the fuck back to sleep”.
But in the early mornings, what can I really do? I have excess horn and I can’t really deal with it. I’m not enough of a dick to wake my wife up to show her my penis, nor am I brave enough to venture out of bed (into the cold – and my flat, I’m finding, is very cold), get onto my computer, masturbate to orgasm and then return to my bed for slumber. The logistics of doing all this, alone, would be a knightmare. I’d probably end up halfway through Scandal: Sex@Students.edu when my alarm goes off, and that’s my cue to stop doing everything else and scream.
I have no other choice. I listen to what my body says and jeopardise everything else for a cheap and dirty orgasm (or several), or I wait with my throbbing erection until my alarm shocks me back to reality.
As I scrabble around to make myself presentable, I remind myself of why I’m doing this. My co-workers are waiting for me. My clients rely on me. Even my pretty colleague is probably stocking up on coconut milk so we can make our coffees at the same time in the morning.
Where does my horn go?
I genuinely have no idea. But, by the time I’ve left and vanished into the amorphous mass of British urban throng, it too has gone its way.
I didn’t, initially, remember the scene I had a dream about. I was only really vaguely aware that I had dreamed about anything at all, and when vague things drift around in the milieu of miscellany in my head, it’s often difficult to place them. If I’m unconscious, of course, it’s nigh on impossible.
What I did remember, however, is watching a scene, being turned on, and then briefly waking up, my physical body quivering and my penis so hard I could have (and would have) had an orgasm right there and then with any amount of stimulation. But, alas, I must have slipped off, because no orgasms were had, and when my morning alarm went of, I barely remembered the dream at all.
So when I got to a PC with the time and energy to explore myself, I was dumbfounded. What was Dreamy ILB watching? Emmanuelle? No. Something by Surrender? No. Love Street, maybe? No. Passion Cove?
And about a nanosecond before I abandoned my search as fruitless – maybe I hadn’t been dreaming about watching porn; maybe I’d just been horny in bed, that happens – I remembered.
And I remembered why and exactly where to find it.
And I got up VLC and cued up the scene and, even before it was finished, I had had the most blissful and satisfying orgasm I’ve experienced for months.
Okay, maybe that’s not the clearest of questions. You’re reading my blog so you probably can’t actually physically see me. Yes, there’s an avatar of me at the top of the page, but even that’s not me. In the more figurative sense, can anyone see me?
I ask because, for the past few weeks, I’ve been feeling fairly transparent. I don’t get mentioned, or talked to (or, I am assuming, talked about) by anyone (outside of my immediate circle, but even then, it’s a safe assumption that I don’t). Yes, I have gone through moments in my life when I have felt unimportant, or hopeless, or unlovable. This isn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, a new feeling.
And I don’t make any pretence towards being particularly important. I am entirely unremarkable in my civilian life and, despite the occasional titter of laughter, not particularly successful as a comedian either.
But what about ILB?
The other week I had a performance review with my boss at work. Fairly positive though it was (although less glowing than mine was last year, when I had a much younger and smilier boss), one thing came out that I wasn’t even aware I knew until I said it.
“The thing is,” I heard myself say, “because I have very low self-esteem, if you don’t tell me that what I’m doing is any good, I’m going to assume it isn’t.” “But what you’re doing is good!” “But you’re not telling me that! If you don’t say it, I’m going to think I’m not doing well!” “But you’ve been doing this for ten years!” “And I still need validation! At the very least you could make a note that I’ve told you this!”
Ralph gets it. Yvan eth nioj!
I don’t ask for much. In my younger years I would have… well, not exactly delusions of grandeur, but I did like to paint myself as something of a savant, or more central to a concept (or a group) than I actually was. I still needed validation, of course, but I could kid myself into thinking that I was being seen. The fact that I could write “wheeeeeeeee! I’m a pop sensation!” in my diary after a gig almost made up for the years of abuse I’d endured in the brass band I’d been in prior to taking up rock.
More than a decade later and I’m less sure. With less and less people telling me I’m awesome I am becoming more and more convinced that I am not, in fact, awesome. As ILB I feel more invisible than ever before, what with the gradual decline of the sex blog as a viable medium (and I don’t do audio porn or have a Patreon or an OnlyFans, so I’m lacking that USP as well!) and the fact that I genuinely feel extraneous anyway, sometimes this makes me wonder if I am anything of a presence at all.
Last time I went to Eroticon I had, on my way there, the curious feeling that people would have forgotten I existed until I actually turned up. I was even preparing for my translucent nature by attempting to reconcile the fact that nobody knew who I was with a joke. That Nick managed to find my lanyard without me having to remind him of my online handle was nothing short of a miracle, so sure was I that people were looking through me like glass.
Is this temporary?
Who cares knows? I go through moments like this; I know I do, even if nobody else is reading me enough to get that impression. I don’t even know what, in particular, brought this on, when the rest of the sex blogging community (or what remains of it…) is having a relatively self-congratulatory, mutually appreciative moment, I am feeling completely auxiliary.
What would happen, I wonder, if I disappeared? Would anyone care, or worse, would anyone actually notice?
Just something I think about, I suppose. You don’t need to do anything, gentle reader. But, if you could find it in your heart to notice me every once in a while, I’d very much appreciate that.
No, wait, come back! This isn’t a strange fantasy I had or another dream which made me orgasm! It’s really a different kind of post, I promise. Are you still reading? ARE YOU?! Okay then.
She’s so bouncy it took me a while to take this screenshot.
It’s been a while since I’ve either had a sexy dream or watched anything featuring Kitten. Since I moved I haven’t really had the wherewithal to put on any DVDs. and only really managed to plug in my external CD/DVD drive about a week ago (ironically, I basically bought it for porn, and haven’t yet used it thus!). My Region 1 copy of Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens is in my special drawer, and I have yet to dig it out.
The fact remains that I have seen Beneath the Valley… so many times that I could probably recite it. I ordered the DVD at the age of 18 (the package itself appeared to have come from Germany!) and, it being one of the very few DVDs I owned at that point, it was something I watched over and over and over and…
…and when the band I was in played Old-Time Religion, I was laughing so much I had to hold onto my bass drum to avoid falling to the floor.
The other night, however
I woke up at about 5am with an entirely new sex scene in my head. I know it actually isn’t in Beneath the Valley…, because I’ve seen all those too. It did, however, have all the trappings – Kitten as Lavonia, on a bed, with plenty of movement, music on the radio and the necessary exhortations for cock.
But some bits were missing. I didn’t see who she was having sex with. I didn’t have any context from the narrator or the quick cuts between scenes the film is famous for. The bit that did wake me up, eventually, was a few seconds of Kitten in a certain position that we get about one second of in the original RM release.
Yeah, I know, I really do. I shouldn’t really be waking up as hard as I did (and I did, I was solid as a rock) due to four seconds of simulated sex that, as far as my memory serves, don’t exist. Perhaps I shouldn’t, at the age of 39, have dedicated so much of my brain to such a niche piece of (admittedly very quotable) media. But I clearly have, at some point, and it’s going on to invent more bits of this film that’s six years older than I am.
It’s 11:30 pm on my first day at university and I’m wanking feverishly in a stall in the toilets of the union bar. It’s club night and my fap fap fap is masked by the thump thump thump from just outside. I’ve never been clubbing before, but here, everybody does it.
That is not all everybody seems to be doing. The sexual energy from the heaving mass of sweaty bodies is electric. As it turns out later, not everyone was having sex with everyone else, but for the majority of us, this is the first day of freshers’ week which, sixth form told us, was specifically reserved for sex with someone new. In this very bar, on the dancefloor outside, I will have incidents where I don’t want to cheat, and those where I’ll fail to get laid. I just don’t know this yet.
Outside this bar bathroom, the milieu continues unabated. The freshers’ reps are all called things like RAUNCHY, PLAYMATE and KING SNAKE. It’s become common knowledge that GIANT does, in fact, have a rather small penis, but he’s been sleeping with half the freshers, which makes it okay. About an hour earlier I had been talking with a pretty blonde who then vanished from view. Her equally pretty best friend apologised on her behalf – she had a boyfriend – but that didn’t bother me, as I was just chatting.
I’d also come to university as someone in a long-term relationship. Engaged, actually. In the unlikely event that I did get any leads to be having the kind of wild and carefree sex I never ended up having, I wouldn’t be following them up on account of the fact that I was in a relaionship.
I am wanking in the toilet because I feel that, despite how out of place I seem to be, and how what is going on elsewhere doesn’t affect me, I deserve, on this very first night, my own sexual experience, so I’m giving it to myself, no matter how desperate or unclean or pathetic this all is. I’m going to have an orgasm here, tonight, and nobody else will know, and that will be mine. Just something that I can do.
Also, I’m horny.
I don’t yet know that the following three years will be an era of sexual self-discovery. That I will feel both the closest to and the furthest away from death than ever before, and that I will emerge from the whole experience having had no more sex, but aware of the sort I wanted to be having. I haven’t even been to a lecture yet.
There’s no way of knowing which way this is going.
I have my first orgasm of semi-independent life standing up, in a bar bathroom stall. Whatever happened next, nobody was going to take that away from me.
There are missed opportunities, and then there are things which never start.
While sitting in hospital I began formulating a vague plan for August. Last summer I flexed my contactless card and visited, by bus, all the bits of my London borough I’ve never seen before. They weren’t all fantastic (one was, as it turns out, mostly an industrial estate), but I managed to get a meal in each one, and at least I could say I had done it.
I’ve always liked this colour scheme…
This year, with a freedom pass in my possession, I had more liberty to travel around London. I had one more place in my borough (well, the neighbouring one, but close enough) that I could find a way to. I wanted to go back to W1 and walk around seeing what’s changed since I last worked there. One thing I particularly wanted to do was to visit every station on the DLR network, taking a picture of every roundel to prove that I’d done it.
It’s not even like the opportunity wasn’t there. For the first two weeks of August I had basically nothing to do. I was just kicking around doing very little and, had I thought about it even once, I could have done at least one of these things. Fair enough, I did spend a week in Amsterdam recently – which was something I had planned to do – but it’s not really the same.
The whole idea behind my mini-sojourns is their random nature. I will have a vague idea about where I’m going and a route to get there, and then I’ll just go. Last year I timed every one to coincide with lunch, so I could go to whichever café I saw first and engender the feeling of “having spent some time elsewhere”. I did, however, have nothing else by way of a plan.
Now that I have one week of August left it’s beginning to dawn on me that this won’t be happening. I can go to the place I mentioned by a relatively convoluted route, provided all the services are running, but doing the whole DLR is out of the question. With the resources and energy I have at my disposal I’ll be lucky to manage the Waterloo and City line.
I also have very little money right now, due to nasty surprises that happened in Amsterdam, so maybe spending time on Oxford Street isn’t the best of ideas, especially seeing how there’s a branch of Waterstone’sand an HMV. The place I used to work at is now a McDonald’s, even, so it’s not like the nostalgia factor is there at all. The more I think about it, the more reasons there are to not do any of this stuff. It might be more rewarding to stay on the sofa playing The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past.
Not to mention the fact that doing anything of the sort requires getting up before midday. I’ve had problems doing that recently.*
Something in me says that the fact I care enough to write about this is an indication of something. It’s not entirely an unforgivable sin to be a little sedentary when one has a degenerative neuromuscular condition and had a heart attack less than two months ago. But I still want to be, at least for a short while, outside – I never really wanted to be in London as a youth; now I can appreciate it, as an adult, I’m finding it difficult to even take my first step.
Think about it: when, in your life, did you first know that someone in your peer group had had sex? Did they brag about it?
There’s usually at least one, although from what I hear it varies according to where you grew up and who your peer group actually was. Most people I’ve talked to seem to concur on a few basic facts, though: it happens during your teens; it may or may not be before the age of consent; it may or may not have been a “good” experience.
In two of the people I’ve talked to, they were that person.
Shocked though my classmates had been to find out that I’d had sex at 17, I was far from being that person – two of the boys in my little group had already done so at 16 and neither of them had enjoyed it – but I was certainly one of the first. To my relief, I didn’t get too many questions (beyond “what does cunnilingus taste like?”. I’ve never been able to answer that one.), but then again
It’s gross to think about your friends doing it. Difficult to visualise. At least with porn it’s actors having sex. It’s less appealing when it’s a mate.
my friend-who-is-a-nurse
not that I had much choice to begin with.
The word “juicy” still makes me cringe
Outside of people at school and in Woodcraft, there was another group of friends I’d talk to. I rarely, if ever, met too many of them, but they lived locally and were readily accessible via ICQ. My first experience with someone having sex was one of them.
To this day I’m not sure if he had full-on PIV, but his girlfriend certainly existed (her face was triangular, according to our mutual friend), and to all intents and purposes all the other things they had been doing was nothing short of an open secret. He was certainly very explicit about what the other things were, and none of us had any reason to doubt him.
“I don’t know if he’s like this at school,” I confessed to our mutual friend, “but online he’s been sort of…” “Bragging?” “Yes. Bragging. About, well…” “Bragging. You don’t need to say anything more. He does that at school. Bragging. All the time. It’s quite gross, actually.”
It’s not nice to boast, although we’ve all done it at some point. Even if you say something like “I won a University of Cambridge competition that I don’t remember entering by writing a paragraph I didn’t save” in the most blasé, nonchalant voice you can muster, it’s still the most humble of brags. But we are advised not to do so from our youth. Arrogance, we are told, is rude.
For those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.
Matthew 23:12
I’ve always found it difficult to express any self-confidence, because I don’t really have any, and I don’t want to appear brash or boorish or full of braggadocio. Living through Mister “I’ve-had-blowjobs”‘ almost constant crowing three years prior had given me a good example of what not to do when I started having regular sex.
This is the sort of thing you can brag about.
I slipped up, of course, but then who doesn’t? Lightsinthesky, who by that point was also having sex, would definitely push it a bit, but between us our sexual conversations were basic and genial – a “what’s your favourite position?” here and “have you tried this?” there, but not competitive in any particular way.
And this is how people should be talking about sex.
Lots of people have sex, or at least some sort of sexual expression. Even if you are asexual, you can still express your (a)sexuality by identifying as such. But there still appears to be a societal barrier; sex is, still, a taboo subject. People will mention it in hushed tones, do so through blushes, or go the other way and become an insufferable braggard. It really doesn’t have to be that way at all, and no other topic has such a black mark on it.
You can be as pleased as you like because you got the English Prize in years 11 and 13, but you’re not allowed to be because you’ve had sex.
There’s a problem there.
I’ve just spent a week in a country which has a much better sex education system, where sex workers are visible in windows at all hours and there are three museums dedicated to the subject. Teen pregnancy there is below 1% and, although I wouldn’t say it’s OUT THERE AT ALL TIMES, sex there is more of a part of life. I’d find it difficult to envision someone from there being anything but cheery about sex worth celebrating.
And that’s my main point, I guess. Sex can very well be something worth celebrating. It’s time we started doing that, rather than using it as an excuse to act like an insidious blackguard.
Today is National Orgasm Day (thanks Clara) and it’s the final day of Disability Pride Month (thanks Hux), so this provides me with the ideal opportunity to write about this. Then I guess I’ll have an orgasm.
Since being diagnosed with DM back in June 2021, I’ve most definitely started “feeling” my disability. Even if I hadn’t been diagnosed – and I was by accident, I was in hospital for something completely different – I probably still would have done, but put it down to being old. (Says the 39-year-old with the word “boy” in his handle.) Whether I’m at work, or resting at home, or even out in town, I’m aware of my dyspraxia, my heavy breathing and my waddling gait. I drop things, I shoulder doors open rather than using my hands, I fumble when digging around in my pockets for my freedom pass, and I scream every morning when my shoulder wakes up a few minutes after I do.
I try my hardest not to complain, though; a lot of people have it worse than I do. My mother’s disability makes her shake uncontrollably and my friend’s killed him. Mine is annoying, and restricting, and more often than not painful, but it doesn’t stop me doing anything. It slows me down a bit, but it’s never quite stopped me. I can work, I can write, I can game, I can read, I can… actually, that’s all I do, really.
And I can orgasm.
Even with occasional forays into the fringes of the same, I haven’t had PIV sex for about a decade now but I will admit to being wary of doing so if the opportunity presents itself. Having put on weight may be one thing, but losing my muscle strength? How can I finger their nipples while licking them out if all my left hand can do is flop around like a fish? How do I roll around in bed without yelling in pain? If I penetrate them, how do I thrust, considering the fact that putting socks on is a challenge for me now?
Oh, and forget 69. That’s out too. There’s no way I’m that supple.
Even though the recent summer heat is a reminder that I won’t be railing anyone in a sundress, I can still orgasm. In fact, since the age of 18 my orgasms have never really changed. The method I use to induce them is almost exactly the same, down to the sameaudiovisual stimulus; the amount I produce (although it varies) is the same; the time it takes is the same. I could even point out to you the places my spaff hits if you ask.
In such extraordinary times, and through everything that’s happened both good and bad, orgasms have been one of my very few constants. They are available and healthy and recreational and free, and I’m very grateful for them. As long as my penis and my hand still work, give me a while and a place to sit (or lie, or stand if I’m feeling risky…) and I’m good.
Yes, it’s messy. Yes, it’s awkward. Yes, cleanup is difficult. But it’s good. My body is failing, but this bit of it works. Frankly, it’s the best bit to work.
I may feel the worst I ever have, but I can make myself feel the best. That’a a dichotomy I can very much live with.
