WHY START A BLOG; WHY START IT NOW?

Because I need something to keep me busy until they make a new season of The Watch.

I kid, I kid. The Watch is terrible, but I felt obliged to see it because I'm a massive fan of the books the show is based on. I needed to watch the series the same way a parent that's told their child has drowned might want to see the corpse.

Starting your blog with a joke about a child drowning? Bold choice!

So why start it for real? Good question! Turns out there are SEVERAL REASONS! Let me break them down for you:

THE FIRST REASON is that I thought of that joke earlier and it was pretty much gold, but I didn't have a place to put it. There are things in my head that I want to share and they just die there. The sad truth is I have no friends; I had separate friend groups as I moved between school, sixth form, university pre-study abroad and university post-study abroad. I never really made an effort to keep in touch but hey, neither did they.

I speak to one or both of my parents daily, and see them in person about once a week. They've been together for 35 years. We didn't use to be this close but they feel bad for me because I am a) homeless and b) bedridden.

DUHN DUHN DUHN! Didn't expect that, did you? Honestly though, it's not as bad as it sounds. I've technically been homeless since March 2018 and should probably talk about that soon, but for now let me tell you that I have never been what social workers refer to as "street homeless" and I am currently safe and sound in a care home.

The being bedridden thing is also not as bad as it could be; I lost the use of my legs after being treat to hospital sometime on Christmas Eve, 2019. It was pretty bad, but better than when I was brought into hospital on Christmas Day, 2018! There's a lot here that I'll get into later as well, but for now let me say that I am hopeful that I'll walk again at some point, and would be already if COVID-19 hadn't fucked my long-term care plans.

I have a brother, but we are not close, figuratively or literally. He name is Jason and he lives with his fiancee Amy, three hours away, but we've spent less time than that face-to-face cumulatively over the past five years. We've maybe spent three hours on the phone in that time too? A few weeks into lockdown we started a family Zoom meeting between Jason and Amy, my parents, and myself. It's all perfectly fine, though I've no doubt that the others set it up and then my mother pressured Jason into asking me to join. There is still BAGGAGE we are IGNORING, and it's clear he's not interested in getting any closer. An example of this would be him waiting for the scheduled Friday Zoom call to tell me he had proposed to Amy on Wednesday and she'd accepted, whilst my parents, grandfather and her individual parents had all received calls, plus maybe others, and they had announced it on all their social media. How did I miss this? Well...

Never thought they'd beat out Dogpile

THE SECOND REASON I'm writing this is that I have never really had an honest social media presence. I made a website on my parents' Gateway PC in 1998 using Microsoft Publisher. By today's standards it was unbearable, but I was eleven and it won loads of awards so shut up! It was full of the sort of shit you'd see on Facebook if Facebook existed - interests, jokes, local legends, a photo of me sat at the PC keyboard... real basic shit. The site was littered with the stock GIFs that came with Publisher and every page played a different royalty-free MIDI song you had no control over - a lack of volume control was something for which I was frequently marked down on when my site was judged for the aforementioned awards. The site peaked in popularity in early 2000 after Virgin Media took an interest:

The most radical way to ride the information superhighway

They printed a book that was essentially a series of lists of URLs, with maybe 15 sites relevant to a broad topic and a short description of each site. I remember the first entry under Music was something like "http://www.abba.com - The official website of the popular Swedish pop band." I can't remember how they described me or my site, but it was listed under Cool Sites For Kids. I got quite a few e-mails from people who liked the site all over the world. I guess the net was pretty small back then and the concept of search engines hadn't really caught on yet. Virgin never told me they were doing this and I never owned a copy of the book, though I did see it in a bookstore once. God only knows why I didn't ask my parents to buy me a copy.

I got rid of the site entirely before starting VIth form: I hadn't updated it in ages and suddenly all the other websites stopped looking like they were designed by eleven year olds and mine was embarrassing. Then some of my classmates started sharing their interests and feelings on MySpace and GeoCities and I felt that I'd already done that and I'd done it better; I'd lost interest once before and starting over didn't hold any appeal for me. My friend Dave talked me into writing a webcomic and built me a site for one; he thought I was really funny and I was big into webcomics at the time. I wrote, drew and scanned about 200 comics free hand and uploaded them on his site. I don't think anyone was really reading it but I got to be a very small part of a growing community and got to swap emails with other creators and vote in the Web Cartoonists Choice Awards a couple of times! I carried it on for a while when I started University but gradually posted less and less. One day I went cold turkey reading them as well. I had gotten to the point where I was spending at least two hours an evening looking at new comics on sites I was following and then would also read the archives of comics I didn't yet follow. One day I just didn't feel like doing that, and then I never loaded up a comic site again. I'm weird like that; I'll just give up on things that make me happy, I think it's linked to my depression. I lost all the digital copies of my comics years later when my hard drive crapped out, and the paper versions when I became homeless. I probably posted my last comic in 2006.

I did start a Twitter account under an alias in October 2019. I didn't have access to my laptop for a couple of months, but I had a tablet on which I played games and listened to podcasts. This is going to sound pretty lame, but Nintendo launched a Mario Kart app and I liked it. There were rewards for completing certain challenges, and one of those was to log in with a Twitter account. I decided there was no harm in making an account for bullshit like that and created one under the name Tankerton Latch! Surprise, not my real name! (FUN FACT: I had bought the necessary paperwork to make that my legal name two yeara earlier when drunk, but was too chickenshit to sign it when sober! I am a mess!)

I didn't actually tweet anything until December of that year. I texted my parents a few jokes about BBC's The Apprentice, the one show we all watch. I decided to share them on Twitter and got some feedback: both from one of the contestants I was taking the piss out of and from Claude Littner, one of Lord Sugar's advisors who doesn't suffer fools gladly. My mum couldn't believe he had read my joke and found it funny. I then started posting frequently and kept it for just over a year. I followed nearly 200 accounts: mainly writers, comedians and Muppets. I reached a peak of around 145 followers, mostly people who'd liked my replies to other tweets, people I was following and, for some reason, a large number of young comedians from the New York scene. I posted over 4,500 tweets before being taken into hospital late December 2020. (EDIT: Upon proofreading this I realised I should clarify these events are unrelated! FURTHER EDIT: I read this a few hours after posting it and oh boy, I am bad at proofreading) I don't know what it is that lures me to hospital during the holiday season; maybe it's the tinsel? Anyways, I was there overnight after a case of supra ventricular tachycardia, which is a fancy way of saying my heart had started beating at around 275bpm, as it sometimes decides to do!

I didn't look at Twitter during my stay and for whatever reason never felt like checking the account again after leaving hospital either, it genuinely held no interest. I had put £75 into Coinbase a few days earlier, so maybe that filled the space Twitter had held before, though after a couple of days using it a lot I started easing off, and cashed out after six weeks when my money had doubled. I honestly didn't look at my Twitter feed again until last Monday, when I checked in to see if I had linked an e-mail address to the account. I saw the following message from a follower I had spoken with before:

Hi. Haven't seen anything from you in a while. Hope all's well.

I felt a little guilty, and realised I was maybe being a dick to the few users I did back-and-forth with regularly. It surprised me this guy had felt my absence and reached out. I felt I needed to commit to leaving, so I hit him back with the following:

Thanks for looking out man, really appreciate it! First time I've been on here in a while and have really not missed it, it's like I spent a year on here and enjoyed it and now I'm done with it, you know? Anyways, take care but don't necessarily expect to hear from me again!

I then edited my bio, changed the account location, and posted the following:

Aw, nobody liked your dog-fucking puns?

And that was that! I did have a few tweets that broke the 1k barrier, usually replies to someone more famous or jokes I had posted under something political. It was exciting to be seen but I never chased it, I was just there to have a good time.

So yeah, I'm writing this because I miss writing regularly and having a body of work I can be proud of.

THE THIRD REASON is that I am finally getting meeting with some mental health experts on Friday of next week! This has been a super long time coming; I last spoke with a counsellor regularly when I was living at University after a year's study abroad. I will get into it later, but for now just know I was suffering from severe mental illness that stopped me from signing up for or attending classes and caused me to harm myself pretty brutally twice.

I have spoken to mental health specialists twice since. I spoke to a counsellor in July 2018 a couple of months after I tried to overdose in a flat I was squatting in because being dead seemed better than living in the streets. The second time was in January 2020 after my legs weren't working for me and I didn't know if they would be functional again or where I would have to go if they didn't. Each time I requested further counselling but it never came.

I was duped into moving out of temporary council accommodation and into a care home in October 2020, which is definitely something I'll be venting about later. I asked to be referred for physiotherapy and mental health treatment. The physiotherapy hasn't happened but at long last I'm going to get my noggin looked at! A couple of weeks ago I started taking some kind of head meds (not sure what, but neither citalopram not sertraline; both of which I took in the past) but I've been examining a lot of my baggage over the last few months anyway. This blog is a way for me to explore the haunted house that is my broken brain and record whatever skeletons I uncover.

I don't know if I'll tell the shrinks about this or if they'd read it if I did. I don't know how anyone would find this and if they'd find it interesting: there must be other places to hear straight white man-children pontificate, right? I'm reminded of the ultimate nihilist from Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker books: he explains to the protagonist, Arthur Dent, that he doesn't believe in literally anything, so Arthur won't be able to convince him to help him out. Getting desperate, Arthur points out that he's been playing with his cat the whole time, so must surely believe in the existence of the cat. The nihilist regretfully informs him that no, he doesn't believe the cat is there, but he enjoys acting as if it does.

So that's the way I'll be approaching this: I don't care if no-one reads this: I don't know if I'd want to read it if someone else had written it. I need to do this for me. That said, I'm certainly not discouraging feedback, and intend to read and hopefully reply to any comments. I will be moderating the comments, not because I think censorship is totally fire and have a poster of it on my bedroom wall, but because I will be talking frankly about my experiences with SUICIDE and DEPRESSION, which means this blog could well be read by someone SUFFERING WITH THOSE ISSUES, and the last thing I want is for a kid trying to face their demons having to deal with some hatetank spouting off in the comment section.

Julie, of Strict Julie Spanks! She sometimes liked to be spanked too! She contains multitudes, yo!

THE FINAL REASON I started this blog was because I had created a blogger account, and there's only so long you can leave a toy in its box before you want to play with it. I recently started posting comments over at Strict Julie Spanks after following it for years. I don't recall how I first found her blog or when, I just remember it was before her account of experimenting with figging her husband, with the assistance of her sister no less! This means I've been a lurker there for around eight years? I went through a long phase of dipping into other people's accounts of their kinky exploits; partly for titillation, partly to try and figure out my own deal, and partly because reading what other people were getting up to in real life made me feel better about my personal kinks and hang-ups. The figging episode is a good example of why I kept her site in my mind - I never bookmark porn from fear of embarrassment of being discovered as a pervert - though she doesn't always post frequently, she often posts about wild adventures she's had or fantasies she's having about a new aspect of kinkdom. Her married life at the beginning of the blog seemed very vanilla, then she grew more and more dominant and lovingly sadistic. After being very much a domme for many years she started exploring her sub side, tentatively at first but soon enjoying occasionally subbing for her husband and other scene partners. She is now a very imaginative switch, so you never know what she might be writing about. To paraphrase Love & Anarchy, a sexy Swedish comedy series that I will absolutely write more about later, it's been fun watching her transform from a seed to a flower to a tree, and is now becoming a forest. My favourite Julie story is also one of the most shocking and in my eyes the funniest. As a part of letting her sister discipline her, Julie consented to being fucked with a strap on by sticking her sister's rubber cock in her mouth unprompted, earning her a scolding. She then further embarrassed herself by lubing up her bumhole without provocation, wrongly assuming her sister was going to take her up the ass! If that isn't adorable sub behaviour then I don't know what is.

I created a blogger account not expecting to use it for blogging. I wanted to comment on a couple of her recent entries (no pun intended!) and my comments weren't showing up. I thought creating an account would help me figure out why my comments weren't showing up. I think I was exceeding a word count and ended up e-mailing her my thoughts. She made it clear, in both her e-mails and under the comments I had managed to post, that she very much enjoyed my writing, and I found this incredibly gratifying.

I don't know why I decided to start posting enthusiastically and appreciatively after all this time, other than that I've recently gotten rid of some sexual baggage in order to grow from a flower to a tree, and that she seems to be leaning towards trying some things that are right in my sweet spot. But yeah, I've never written honestly about what turns me on before and I want to write honestly about some other things and see how that feels. So far? PRETTY DANG GOOD, YO!

In the spirit of full disclosure I should mention I posted a comment once before, after she revealed she would be receiving a bare-bottomed spanking from her father! As you might imagine, this inflamed the imagination of many of her fans! I wrote a comment under a pseudonym, and she commented as she usually does: graciously and with her own kinky twist:

I know what you're thinking and yes, the handle I picked IS like Spanish Fly! Tell a girl that's your name and her panties will drop themselves.

Looking back I can't believe how unsupportive I was, too eager to put my desires out on front street! I bet I loved how she added her Mom to the scenario, I was picturing David and Sue (her indulgent sister and long-suffering husband, irrespectively) punishing her little bottom in private! I shouldn't have been surprised, she is something of an exhibitionist and likes to show off for her Daddy. David has been subjected to all of the punishments suggested over the years, in front of a third party no less, so that brief exchange gives you a good taste of what limits she's been willing to explore.

So to summarise; feeding my long-held desire for a lady on a different continent I have never met to let her husband put her in a diaper left me with a blank blog and confidence in my writing ability. Julie is the reason I'm not keeping all this shit in my head any longer.

Now you know a lot about me and what this blog will be about. Some things I've been thinking about a lot and so will probably write about are:

WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE WATCH, AND WHY I CARE - I started justifying calling the BBC America show terrible and realised I had a lot to say about the program, how I've consumed media in the past, and what entertainment will always hold a place in my heart

A LOT CAN CHANGE IN AN HOUR - Two pieces of information that allowed me to let go off some baggage that had been weighing me down for years

MY TIME AS A HOMELESS - How I became homeless, what I did for money, and how I kept off the street

HOW I NEARLY KILLED MYSELF, AND WHY I HAVEN'T TRIED AGAIN - The circumstances surrounding my overdose, and how I went about doing it

MY BROTHER: WHAT WENT WRONG AND WHY HE HATED ME

MY PARENTS: WAYS THEY LET ME DOWN AND THE WORST THING I EVER DID TO THEM

TEN GOD-LEVEL EPISODES OF TELEVISION - A list I've been compiling in my head for some time that I think says a lot about me.

WHAT TURNS ME ON - A look at my stunted sexual growth and my relationship with pornography.

WHY I FELL IN LOVE WITH NATE AND MY THOUGHTS ON CONSENT - As I've mentioned, I have a lot of sexual hang ups. Natalie Palamides' Netflix special pretty much demands the audience consider the topic of consent. Turns out I have a lot of thoughts on the matter!

MY MEDICAL HISTORY - I don't really think much about my various medical issues, I'm lucky to be alive even without my body giving up on me. That said, they obviously have made a huge impact on my life so a handy history is probably a good idea.

MY VISIT TO PLATHVILLE - Why I relate so hard to Edgar Plath, elder son of the ultra conservative Plath family that star in TLC's Welcome to Plathville

WHY I LOVED LOVE & ANARCHY - What I found sexy, what I found funny and whatever else leaps out as I rewatch the show.

I don't know when I'll write about these things or in what order; they're just 12 things it seems obvious I should write about. It also seems obvious that I've talked enough at this point so I'll leave you to it!

Peace! ✌