Rantage

Okay, if you’re here for some new wank fodder, you’re out of luck. Go visit my Tumblr or something, while I vent. Go on.

Last evening we went to a fancy-schmancy dinner party for a friend’s birthday; he’s the “baby” of our particular social circle, having just turned 50 (I’m the next youngest, having reached that age almost 3 years ago). So, I’m sitting around the table talking some of our other friends, and a few of them suggested that we meet regularly in a newly-opened  local pub. “It’s for older people,” one of them said.

“What?” I asked. “How do you market for ‘older folk’ when you’re a pub?”

“Well, that’s what they’re doing,” somebody else said. “They’re trying to keep the kids out.”

“How does that work? What, do they play Frankie Vallee  and doo-wop music?”

Another one nodded, seriously. “And none of that rap music and head banger stuff, either.”

“But… but I like rap music, ” I responded. And then — quite uncharacteristically — I shut up as I imagined several dozen of my friends sitting around, drinking pitchers of light beer and waxing nostalgic about the good old days. And then I walked into the next room to see what the children of my friends were up to.

Look, I understand if you don’t like rap music. Or any other kind of music, for that matter; we don’t all have the same tastes, and that’s actually a good thing. But I can’t stand it when my peers start acting like my freaking grandparents.

Pretty soon, the weather will be warmer — and lighter — in the morning, so I’ve been slowly getting things together to get a start on my morning bike rides. You may remember that last year I supplemented my weight lifting with cycling on alternating days, and took a longer ride on the weekend. And it paid off; my blood pressure was down, my heart rate was excellent, and I wore a smug expression as I tweeted the stats on different rides, much to the dismay of my friends who remained chair-bound.

“What the hell are you doing lifting weights at your age?” they would ask. “What’s with all the damn bike riding?” My answer was essentially this: “I’m lifting weights now so when I’m 70, I’ll be able to more than just lift a six-pack or the remote. Feel free to de-friend me if you don’t want to read my posts.”

Anyway, it was a coincidence that yesterday morning I was looking for a different music player for my Android phone (AT&T Captivate / Galaxy S). I installed MixZing and at the moment I’m looking the artists on the  playlist that I made up for my bike rides. In no particular order:

• Offspring
• AC-DC
• Beastie BOys
• Van Halen
• Cake
• Judas Priest
• The Clash
• Cypress Hill
• Frankie Goes to Hollywood
• Aerosmith
• B-52s
• Barenaked Ladies
• Green Day
• Patti Smith
• Run DMC
• Sir Mixalot
• Talking Heads
• Billy Idol
• Third Eye Blind
• Twisted Sister
• Blink 182
• ZZ Top
• Tone Loc
• Rezillos
• Ramones
• Pink
• Nirvana
• Doug E. Fresh & Slick Rick
• New Radicals
• Metallica
• MC Hammer
• Madonna
• Korn
• Lady Gaga

Right now, I’m charging the phone via a USB cable to my laptop, and I’ve got “You’ve Got Another Thing Coming” blasting, and if I can figure out which Linux based player is better (I’ve been running Mint and Ubuntu on my old Dell), I’ll be sharing the tunes across my home network.

Do I sound like a fifty-something year old guy?

That was a trick question.  As I’m only a few months away from 53, obviously the answer is “yes“.  The real question in my mind, however, is why so many other 50-something year old guys don’t act like this. I’m not talking about the guys in a mid-life crisis who suddenly realize that they’re not teenagers anymore, and who run off with a hot blonde and a cool car, although that, really, is a symptom of a larger problem. No, I’m wondering what happens to people that at some point in their lives, they stop learning and appreciating anything new.

Last year at another dinner party, several of my friends didn’t know any popular musicians since the early 80s. Seriously? How do you manage that? Some of my friends are actually proud of their ignorance of  cell phones, digital anything, and computers in general, and believe me, I cringe every time an old high school bud finds me on Facebook. “HI TOM!!! I FINALLY GOT A COMPUTER SO I COULD SEE MY GRANDKIDS ON FACEBOOK. PLEASE ADD ME TO YOUR FRIENDS LIST!!! AND WHY DO YOU ALWAYS POST ABOUT YOUR BIKE RIDES? ARENT YOU TOO OLD FOR THAT? LOL!!”

Jesus H Christ in a bucket.

Okay, look. I love my friends. That’s why I allow them to hang out with me, and all. And they must love me, because, really, they must in order to put up with the crap that I give them for being the way they are.  But why do some people completely shut out current or popular culture after they hit 20, 30, 40, or whenever? I’ve sat with them at dinner and listened to them complain about “kids today” without the least sense of irony, or even realization that they used to complain about their parents saying the exact same freaking thing. I mean, these are people that lived through the 60s and 70s, for crying out loud.  Former hippies, Dead followers, the sexual revolution, FM radio, even disco. The 60s and 70s were all about cultural change; so why are they so freaking stuck back there?

Yes, I’m annoyed. I’m annoyed that the more I look around, the more lonely I feel. Sure, I’m surrounded by people, but they’re slowly turning into old people. The way things are going, by the time I’m 60, my friends will be zombies; I’ll recognize their bodies, but mentally, we won’t have anything in common anymore. They will have become the walking dead.

Why am I the only one that seems to see this?

I’ll Tumbl for you

Having grown up well before the internet, I often wonder on how the hell any of us ever managed to look at porn back in those days. I mean, there always used to be some around; the older brother of a friend who left used magazines, a found stash near a playground, or maybe somebody’s father’s supply of Playboy or Penthouse hidden behind the tools in the garage. But the really good stuff was usually hard to come by, and those of us living in small towns often had to make do with the Sears catalogue, newspaper ads, and movie posters.

“Lover, I know we’ve been trying this chastity thing for a couple of months, but I’ve been thinking that it’s just not working for me. All that keeping track of how many days, letting you out when I don’t feel like it, and hearing you whine to be released when you’re feeling horny just isn’t what I expected. So I’ve decided that the only way this can work is for me to be totally, one hundred percent in control. From now on, I will take the keys, and I will decide how long you stay in; and believe me, it’s going to be a long time. We’re going to do this seriously, or not at all.”

This is one of the reasons that I’ve been so fascinated with Tumblr for the last few weeks. I mean, I’d known about the micro-slash-photo blogging-slash-social-networking platform for several years, but as I’ve barely been able to keep up with the current batch of web forums and with writing this blog, I’ve never looked much beyond a few pictures posted by somebody I already know (mainly Thumper, Maymay, and more recently, Dev).

I don’t know when that changed, but not long ago I found that I was spending enough time surfing to warrant actually starting my own, mainly with the idea of re-blogging the cool stuff I’d been looking at. Re-blogging is, of course, a nod to those old days when you passed old magazines along to your friends in exchange for others that they may have found. Even back in the dial-up BBS days, porn somewho found it’s way onto your hard drive, and you were expected to post it on the local BBS in exchange for anything else that you were able to download.

More importantly than the titillation though, is that the Tumblr blogging platform acts alike a tracking database so that one can usually follow the original uploader of the picture so that the credit can go where it would be appropriate. Too often  the proper attributions for interesting photos are lost, but re-blogging allows you to find the person who uploaded a picture and (hopefully) to ask them where it came from, or who the subjects are. Personally, I’m glad to see a mechanism in place to help give credit where it’s due; it’s much too easy for the credits to get lost on photos (and stories, etc.) as they get passed around the web.

All that said, I find that I’m a bit surprised at some of the pictures I’ve been spotting. I mean, I know we all have different tastes, which is fine. But my complaint about the number of pictures in certain generes echoes my thoughts on video porn. For example, what is the fascination with “money shots”, that is, pictures of women who have just had semen sprayed all over their face, chest, or other areas? I mean, damn — I know that when I’m pumping away and I’m about to have a massive orgasm, the last thing I want to do is to pull out and let loose with my hand. I don’t like that type of shot in videos, and I’m not crazy about it in stills, either.

"Now, really honey, look at it my way: for the last few years you've spent well over a thousand dollars on viagra so you could be ready for sex when *you* wanted. This year, I'm spending less than two hundred dollars so you can be ready for sex whenever *I* want."

And here’s something that I’m noticing lately that I don’t think I’ve run across before: what’s the deal with all the pictures  of men and women peeing on each other? I know, it’s my own squick, but, much like the facials mentioned above, I find the practice to be a bit degrading. Or maybe that’s just the point, and I’m not wired in a way that allows me to understand  it.

Anyway, I’m sure it won’t surprise anybody that I’ve been liking and reblogging a fairly decent variety of pictures. As I go back and look at them, it’s interesting to note what it says about my taste in what I perceive as erotic. I have some very curvy women, but I also have some muscular, athletic women. There’s a handful of pics of women wearing items in my two favorite colors: tight and shiny. There’s a smattering of cheesecake, including some scans of vintage magazine pinups. There are soem pictures with a femdommish air.  And there’s a few odd pictures of (what I find to be) attractive women of a (very wide!) variety of ages in various states of dress.

“Yeah, I know that idiot Tom Allen writes that nobody is forcing you to wear a chastity device, and that any man who wants out can just force his partner to give him the key. So, I’m telling you right now, honey: any time you want out, you just force me to give you the key, all right?”

Now, you might suspect that I’d have some pictures suggestive of enforced male chastity… and you would be correct. Since the search term “chastity captions” brings a lot of readers to Edge of Vanilla, I figured that it’s something that a lot of people might be interested in seeing, so I have a number of vaguely erotic pictures that I’ve captioned in the comment section (thereby still keeping the original picture traceability).

So, if you’ve read this far, you’re probably wondering how to find this stuff.  Since I’m not very original, my photo blog is called:
The Edgier Vanilla

If you are looking specifically for chastity-related pictures, you can skip the dull, boring shots of curvy women in spandex and look for the photo tags like : chastity or denial. Other tags that might excite your interest are curvy, mature, muscle, or shiny. And yeah, there’s other stuff, too, so feel free to poke around.

Poll Dancing

Okay readers, it’s time to help out a fellow kinkster.

Most of you know that I like to consider Edge of Vanilla not just an entertaining blog, but a resource for people in the community (for some value of community).

Angela Lewis, author of My Other Self — a book about the perfectly normal people living right next door to you who just happen to be fetishists, BDSMers, or just plain kinky — is looking to do some research for another book. She has set up several surveys on her website for people with an interest in foot fetishes, and with cuckolding. If you have a few minutes, please click on over and help a sister out.

A little about Ms. Lewis:

Angela Lewis holds a PhD in education and has worked in IT for many years as a provider of various learning programs to both the government and corporate sector. She is a qualified counsellor and has acted as IT Adviser to the Australian Counselling Association for the past 10 years, publishing extensively in the ACA’s journal on the intersection of society and technology.  While exploring and then writing about how people expressed their sexuality she found that community attitudes towards anything other than mainstream sexual practices remains deeply suspicious and judgemental. So began a 4 year project of gathering narratives and interviewing people who enjoyed a wide range of alternative sexual practices and the result is My Other Self, the stories of ordinary folk quietly leading extraordinary  private lives.

My Other Self is an intrepid anthology of the secret and sometimes bizarre sexual lives quietly practised by millions of everyday people. As these ordinary folk tell their stories it becomes obvious that the world of kinky sex is far from the exclusive domain of rock stars, movie goddesses and politicians. Angela Lewis spent four years researching a diverse range of websites, forums and online communities catering to devotees of all kinds of sexual peccadilloes. These are the stories of the people she met along the way. They live in ordinary neighbourhoods, have jobs, careers and children just like the next person, but very quietly lead far from ordinary sex lives. The result is an absorbing guide to the secret lives of those enjoying a wide range of interests from latex, leather, teeth and diapers, to spanking and hairy armpits and opens the conversation around a wide range of sexual practices in a way that is neither sensational nor confronting. The book covers an extraordinarily comprehensive inventory of fantasies and fetishes which it explains in both an informative and highly readable way.  As well as real-life stories and insights, it contains explanatory background information, links to related interests, jargon and search terms and is easy for the reader to dip in and out and move around. The author wrote for an audience just like herself, an average person with a spouse, kids and mortgage who has never set foot in a bondage dungeon but wouldn’t mind knowing what all the bits on the wall are for!

Also, she blogs about her upcoming research, and has a few insightful tidbits that you might want to peruse.

Ms. Lewis promised to let us know some of the results of the surveys, so stay tuned.

HNT: Spring Training

Seriously, Tom? Not just weeks, but months without an HNT post? Isn’t there any love for the women and men (all 19 of them) who want to see graying chest hair?

 

 

I know it’s still a few more weeks until spring is officially here, but I’m trying to get an early start. I’ve been low-carbing it all winter, and I’ve already shed the 5 lbs that I picked up during the winter holidays (and am thankful it wasn’t more). Now I’m kicking up my weight training program from “leisurely” to “stop slacking”.

I’m telling you , 6-pack abs for the summer – that’s my goal.  Summer will be here before you know it, and I want to look good in those tight spandex bike shorts so I don’t embarrass Mrs. Edge.