Happy Anniversary, SingleTails

We're a day early. But five years ago, on June 6, 2002, if you set your browser this way, here's what you would have read...

So it begins. By way of introduction, I'm a 37 year old gay man, living in Jersey City and working in Lower Manhattan. I grew up in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. I recently purchased a condo in Fort Lauderdale. Part real estate investment, part weekend getaway. My project (as Jean Paul Sartre used that term) is to build for myself a full and happy life as a single, childless man. Sort of a secular monk.

And what's the thing about 'single tails?' Well, everybody needs a hobby. Mine happens to be throwing whips. Primarily I work with snake whips, which are distinct from bullwhips in that a bullwhip has a wooden handle at the end, and a snake whip has a shot-loaded butt on it. I work with a 5' kangaroo snake whip with a 2' fall, a 4' kangaroo snake whip with a 2' fall, and a 5' kangaroo signal whip. What's to like? Absolutely the feeling of wielding that power (the crack from throwing a whip occurs because the power of the throw is concentrated in the tip, which breaks the sound barrier). Also because there is a zen quality to throwing. Like splitting wood. Like target practice. If you think about it, you screw it up. You rely on your body's knowledge, find your center, and throw. Here's an informative link on the subject:

So. More to come.

And hella lot more to come, as it turns out! Tomorrow will be five years and almost two thousand posts.

Back then, blogging was a relatively new thing. For the most part, there were a few political bloggers out there and high school kids. Blogger, of course, was the only game in town. Live Journal had yet to set up their Fruity Little Club. (I hate LJ because unless you have a journal on Live Journal, you can't post comments. Bastards!)

And for a while, it seemed to me that I was the only blogging leatherman on the World Wide Internet. I found plenty of other queer bloggers, but it was a few months at least before I discovered LeatherEdge and LeatherEgg.

Jeez. Five years.

My readership has waxed and waned and waxed and waned over the years. But I still keep plugging away at it. Way back when, I would get emails from infatuated folks who ran across the url for my weblog on my WorldLeathermen profile (shhhh! WorldLeathermen frowns on that, in a verrrrry Live Journal kind of way) and declare, "I just read your entire blog!" That would be quite the undertaking now.

And, of course, leatherfolk with weblogs are now legion. I sure can't keep up with them all.

A few times, I've thought about chucking the whole project, sensing that I just didn't have much more to say. But I persist, almost, at times, in spite of myself. And I don't see much sign of stopping now.

So it continues.