Today’s Bisexual Thoughts: “I’m Not Gay, But…”

The source of this scribble comes from an odd place:  An email I got from “that site” I like to riff about from time to time.  Since I’m a member, I get emails from the site kinda regularly and, most of the time, I don’t even read them; I’ll glance at it, delete it, move on to the next email.  However, the one I got today got my attention even though I’ll admit to not reading the whole email.  The banner said, “I’m not gay, but every now and then I like to have my dick sucked by a guy!”

I saw this and my first thought was, “Who says you have to be gay for this to happen?  Hah, haven’t you heard of bisexuality and bro-jobs?”

My second thought was, “I wonder if there are a lot of guys who’d unlimber their cock for a good sucking by a guy but they’re still worrying about being seen as gay if they did?”  The question is rhetorical because, sure, there are an untold number of guys whose only reason for not experiencing an M2M blow job is that this is something still largely associated with gay men.

My third thought, generated as I opened WordPress to write this and to see what’s going on in here today, was actually me laughing silently thinking about this; ah, man, some guys can just be pretty clueless at times.

My fourth thought was, “I wonder if some guys who fall into this category think that a bro-job is some new and trendy thing… or are they beginning to see the light in that dudes do suck each other’s cocks and they’re not gay?”  Not so rhetorical a question because it could be both things and both could be attributed to the “fact” that a lot of guys suck cock and will tell you in a flat, skinny second that they’re not gay… and they’re not bisexual either.  I got to this part of my thinking and was reminded of a guy I knew who, when swinging with his wife, would routinely suck cock and get fucked in da butt… and fiercely denied that he was bisexual and used the “excuse” of playing D/s games and under the “I was just following orders!” thing.  Yeah, right – sure you were…  After a lot of discussion – and in between him saying that he never returned any favors to the other guy, he broke down and admitted that even though he did this under whatever D/s rules he and his wife had, um, he went along with it because, ah, he loved sucking cock and taking it in the ass because he was, indeed and in fact, bisexual.

Getting a “straight” guy who’s into cock sucking to admit that he’s bisexual might be likened to trying to pet a hungry tiger – you can do it but at great risk – but stuff like this makes me think more about what guys are thinking when it comes to this and, importantly, what methods of justification they use to tell themselves that, okay, I know I’m not gay… but when a dude sucks my dick, it sure as hell feels good.  Which, of course, it does… but that’s not the point.  I know that some guys are into this up to their eyeballs and the justification used is that if he never returns the favor, it’s not gay at all; it’s the same justification I’ve heard some guys use when their woman accuses them of cheating on her and he says, “I didn’t fuck her – she just sucked my dick!” and as if getting your dick sucked isn’t sex.

Hmm, let’s see… we know that if Guy A blows Guy B – and whether or not Guy B returns the favor – it’s long since been established that this is homosexual sex and even if there’s no fucking involved.  To one extent and given the raft of shit gay men have gone through in the past, it kinda makes sense that putting some distance between themselves and true gay men is a bit warranted…doesn’t make the act any less “gay,” though – it just is what it’s always been.  Humans are amazing creatures in that all we have to do is think that what we’re actually doing is somehow different from what’s really going on to effectively deny that if you look like a duck and quack like a duck, you’re really anything other than a duck.  In the sexuality world, it’s no secret that bisexuals are said to be in abject denial about really being gay… and, no, it’s not just gay folks saying this and one of the reasons why this accusation of denial even exists is because there are still a whole lot of people in the world who think – and incorrectly so – that you’re either straight or you’re gay.  Thus, Guys A and B can, for whatever reason works for them, can find themselves heavily engaged in a cock sucking frenzy and the perception is that they must be gay; if a more open-minded observer is aware of this, okay, they could be bisexual or, if one’s mind is a lot more open, eh, they’re just two guys who know and understand that getting your dick sucked not only feels pretty damned good but isn’t necessarily sexuality-specific given that one does not have to be gay or bi to suck a dick (or to eat a pussy if the discussion is about Gal A and Gal B as well as including women in this discussion for a moment).

What is a bit bothersome is that the perception of two guys blowing the living daylights out of each other is a purely gay thing to do; it implies and even insists that if Guys A and B are doing this, they have to be gay because only gay men do this to each other.  As always, the truth is very different – did ya know there are some gay men who wouldn’t suck a dick even if you put a gun to their head?  Well, wait… maybe they would but it’s an indication of what someone would have to do in order to entice them to do it.  These days, a lot of men (in particular) aren’t fans of being labeled as bisexual; they look like a duck, quack like a duck, but are really a cat – anything other than the duck they’re behaving like.  Oh, they don’t deny that they love to suck cock or are into the anal thing; they don’t really deny that they’re bisexual – they just don’t like being tagged as a bisexual because, somehow, this is offensive to them.  Yes:  Anyone can think of themselves in any way that works for them… but if you think that this kind of mental fencing sounds a bit cray-cray, I’d say that you’re right – it is… but what you’re seeing and hearing about this is how the human mind goes about justifying what its owner is doing so that whatever the owner is doing isn’t what it really is.

I don’t say that labels are bad in that sense; while we can and have used labels in some pretty offending ways, humans have this need to be able to identify their environment and we couldn’t interact with our environment without being able to do this and the simplest example of this are traffic lights:  We establish and define that red means stop, yellow means proceed with caution, and green means go and without these labels, well, you can imagine the problem in not knowing that red means stop.  In sexuality terms there are at least three things you can be, depending on who you’re talking to:  Heterosexual, bisexual, homosexual and these three things have their own criteria attached to their nomenclature and, again simply, opposite sex, both sexes, same sex.  The thing is that we know this and that includes all those folks who say that bisexuals and bisexuality doesn’t exist (otherwise, what the fuck are you riffing about?) but, jeez, I guess we really wouldn’t be so human if we didn’t slice and dice these things to fit our perception of ourselves, would we?

Getting your dick sucked (or your pussy eaten) doesn’t mean that you’re gay… it might not – and depending on how you think – mean that you’re bi; what it does mean is that, ah, when it comes to sexual pleasures, you’d not object a whole lot of the person sucking your dick (or eating your pussy) happens to be of the same sex as you are because regardless of this, having this done produces some rather satisfying results.  It’s not really a matter of it being better to give than receive – that’s just a person preference – but given the three states of sexuality (and, again, depending on who you’re talking to), well, you’re gonna fit into one of them and, get this:  If it’s true that actions speak louder than words – and a lot of people accept this as a truism and a matter of fact – then how can you be someone who has sex with both men and women and not be bisexual and because you say you aren’t?

At the end of the day, it really doesn’t matter what you think; I’m just the guy who’ll tell you that if you like exchanging blow jobs with another guy, you don’t have to be gay to do it and if you wanna think that you’re not bisexual, that’s okay, too, but, sure, if you wanna, go suck a dick and get yours sucked and, yeah, go eat some pussy and get yours eaten if it makes ya feel good!

 

 

Top Searches: “How to…”

“…get a blowjob from gay friend” popped up under Top Searches and this is one I can easily answer (not that the searcher is gonna see it) so here goes.  The best way to get a blowjob from a gay friend is to ask him.

Good luck, searcher!

 

Today’s Bisexual Thoughts: Sign of the Times?

The other day I waxed nostalgic about my version of the good old days and how much easier it was for a guy to get some dick as compared with today.  I was talking with Cityman yesterday and I think that had he grown up in the time period I did, he would have fit in nicely with the simplistic, no strings attached way we did it back then.  Today, while there are guys who insist on NSA sex with other men, there also seems to be a lot of guys who are not only against NSA sex and the much-dreaded hookup, but they seem to be taking Friends With Benefits to a whole different level.

I don’t disagree that establishing a FWB thing with another guy is (or can be) a good thing where items like safety and discretion are concerned but, once upon a time, FWB used to mean being friends and enough so that if you wanted to fuck, it wouldn’t be a problem; it effectively smashed the ages-old admonishment that friends can’t fuck friends and, importantly, carried an element of NSA with it or,as I’ve said, all of the perks of being in a relationship without any of the responsibilities and obligations.  Having a friend meant you could hang out with them and do things while wearing clothes but you could also do some stuff butt naked and all it meant was y’all just had it like that.

No commitments, no promises made or broken; just good “clean” fun if and when the situation called for it.  FWBs could see other people (with or without clothes) and it wasn’t a problem (or much of one) because it kept them free to either have other FWBs or just the one… but not be tied down with the rigors of actually being in a relationship with each other.  You liked them enough to want to fuck them when you could but, um, ya didn’t like them that much that you’d want to be waking up to them every morning.

Bi guys were quick to jump on the FWB bandwagon – if it helps, think bro job – and guys made it work; we’re not gonna be a couple, per se, but we can hang out every now and then (and as time for such things allowed) and, uh, if the moment called for dicks to come out (and asses/legs hiked into the air), okay, man – we’re that cool with each other so it’s not gonna be a problem.  Then something changed and I can’t honestly say that I know the “exact” moment the FWB dynamic among men veered off to the side.  Again, it makes sense that if you wanna play with a dick, you find that one guy who is of the same mind as you are about this; it’s safer (compared to the much-dreaded hookup) and a lot more discrete in that if you’re seen hanging with your bro, not very many people are gonna think much about it or be suspicious about why “Hank” and “Ted” are almost always seen together – again,if it helps, think bromance if our hypothetical guys are seen to be having a whole lot of fun in each other’s company and to the point where some might think and/or say, “Hmm, they must be fucking each other!” but more in a joking manner than a serious suspicious of sexual activity.

I’ve written in past scribbles that there seems to be a lot of men these days who are loath to drop their gear for a guy unless there’s a degree of being into in play as well as a high degree of exclusivity involved; an exception is made for married bi guys because, of course, they are bound to handle their duties at home (and provided they’re still able to handle certain duties if you catch my drift).  In talking with Cityman about his views and, specifically, where he lives, I don’t doubt that there are a lot of men in his area who are about the dick and nothing but the dick – let’s hook up, do this thing, and if I don’t ever see you again, it was fun, dude.  He shares with me that a lot of the guys he just communicates with aren’t just looking for some good dick – they’re looking to establish a relationship of some kind and, it seems, taking the once-convenient FWB mode and taking it to a bit more than FWB and with overtones of exclusivity… and, apparently, all the issues that come with being an item; not exactly boyfriends in that sense but along the lines of, “We’ve had sex… and now you gotta dedicate yourself to me at all times and in all ways!”

Cityman says that he believes gay marriage is responsible for this and I tend to disagree because this… shift in the M2M FWB dynamic was happening before gay marriage blew up.  See, the problem with the NSA approach to sex is that the participants are expected and required to ignore any feelings other than lust and it’s not that some folks aren’t able to put up a huge wall between their emotions and their lust for sex… but sex is pretty damned powerful and has proven over all this time to be a master-key to a person’s emotions; if having sex with someone doesn’t unlock those emotions you’d rather not be bothered with the first time you have sex, if you keep having sex with them, the lock you placed on your deeper emotions will eventually get picked.  So, sure, if “Hank” and “Ted” become FWBs and they’re having a lot of sex with each other and spending a lot of time hanging out together, chances are good that things will go from being a matter of convenience for the two of them to something more than that, not just because the sex is outstanding but also because the longer they interact with each other, the more they learn about each other and the feelings that some guys avoid like the plague will start to manifest themselves.  That, in and of itself, isn’t really the problem…

The problem crops up when those “extra feelings” come into play and something has to be done about it and exclusivity is invoked or put on the table which effectively erases the line between just being friends and friends who can do each other if/when needed.  It’s about as close to declaring your FWB is now your boyfriend as it can get without making it official.  Keep in mind that I’m not really talking about “Hank” and “Ted” falling madly in love with each other but one of the aspects of human behavior:  If you find something that’s working for you, you not only want to keep it and get all you can out of it, you want it all to yourself… but it also winds up negating the whole purpose or concept of FWB because, in a lot of cases I’ve heard about, once the FWB arrangement gets to this point, you are effectively off the market and having other FWBs just ain’t cool; “You’re mine now and I’m not gonna stand for you seeing other guys, man!”  It also has the effect of taking our hypothetical single guys’ status of being single and kicking it to the curb.

The original intent of FWB wasn’t about all of this – all of the perks, none of the responsibilities of actually having a committed relationship.  In my mind, this shift in the dynamic plays into some of the things I’ve been reading about bisexuality, namely, if you’re not having or thinking about engaging in a same-sex relationship, your bisexuality, such as it is or might be, isn’t valid.  It also plays right into the heteronormative narrative:  No sex without a relationship or other kind of investment in place; otherwise, any sex you’re having with someone has zero meaning and substance and should be avoided at all costs.

Wow, right?  Now, perhaps, to many of you, this makes sense and because, for the most part, this is what many of us were taught – casual sex because you can do it is bad, relationship sex is good.  But sex between bisexual men pretty much ignored this long-standing edict (excluding any involvement with gay men, for the purposes of this discussion) and it was being able to ignore this that made sex between men so damned attractive; “Hank” and “Ted” didn’t have to be into each other and, really, didn’t have to “like” each other except to like each other enough to want to have sex or, as you’ve seen me write hundreds of times, “Hey, do you wanna do it?” and if the reply was, “Yeah!” you just stripped down and did it, no muss, no fuss, and what else can we do today?

I’ve seen a trend that, perhaps only in my own opinion, seeks to “normalize” bisexuality or handling things in this is done using the same rules and behaviors that men and women have been adhering to since time immemorial.  Some casual sex might be allowable and even “necessary” in order to set the stage for a higher level of commitment/investment in each other and it just seems to me that this “normalization” is, at best, society’s way of justifying bisexual behavior or, if you do it “by the book,” then it’s kinda/sorta okay.  I’ll point out that I’m not saying that this is a good or bad thing… but I do find it rather curious because, again, I come from a time when it was never like this.

Cityman often “complains” about his guys being clingy and I fuck with him and tell him, “Well, that’s what you get for being good at what you do!” and I don’t mean just how he can throw it down; he’s also a really nice guy and treats people like people should be treated – respectfully.  Sometimes I laugh at him because he does, in fact, display all of the things that would make him an excellent committed partner… if he were interested in being some guy’s boyfriend.  I know that he subscribes to the original intent of FWB but, as he tells me, a lot of the men he comes in contact with – verbal or otherwise – have something more in mind and as I said to him last night, “It’s what you want versus what they want… and you have no control over what they want.”  Logically, you run into a guy you not only want to get with but is deemed to be a good candidate for FWB; you communicate your position in this clearly and concisely and in ways that doesn’t allow room for any interpretation other than what you stated… and the other guy can agree across the board and even agree to this somewhat NSA dynamic…

And if you know anything about men, you know that, um, there are times when we’ll tell you exactly what you want to hear in order to get what we want and that’s not any different when it comes to things M2M.  I’m not saying that all guys are habitual liars when it comes to this (and despite our very bad reputation in this area)… but what I will say is that if you think that the original agreement isn’t going to change somewhere down the road and especially if the FWB sex is running wild and free, bluntly, you’re sadly mistaken and, perhaps, just a bit naive.  And, really, if you don’t ever consider that it’s always been the other guy’s intent, purpose, and agenda to become very exclusive with you – and no matter what he originally agreed to, um, ya might want to work on your situational awareness abilities or, easier, don’t take what he said as the gospel truth of things.

Because, being blunt again, if the sex and other aspects are that good, a push toward exclusivity seems to be the next “logical” step but, again and again, it only becomes a problem if either “Hank” and “Ted” aren’t interested in really being boyfriends and playing house with each other.  When single people get together and commit to being in a relationship, we tend to treat this arrangement just like being married; exclusivity, monogamy, the whole nine yards except should things go south, ya might not need a lawyer to settle things… and if what Cityman has been telling me about what he’s been seeing is on-point, the FWB dynamic has taken undergone a drastic change from its original concept and intent… and whether this is really and truly a good or bad thing depends on what someone caught up in this thinks and feels about someone trying to take them off the market (if they’re single) and, um, they really like the inherent (or imagined) freedom being single provides.

The male bisexual dynamic is, indeed, undergoing a transformation and if female bisexuals are seeing the same thing, well, the ladies aren’t talking about it and if they are, I haven’t seen it.  Today, there are more male bisexuals than, perhaps, at any other time in the past but that’s not all that surprising since, um, boys will always be boys in that sense so it’s not as much what guys like “Hank” and “Ted” are doing with each other – it’s how they’re going about doing it and there’s more of a push toward exclusivity and that “being into” level of commitment these days.  Instead of guys – and I’ll say predominantly for lack of a better word – getting with any agreeable guy they might come across, a lot of guys are being very specific, not only about the type of guy they wanna do the nasty with but the conditions under which this can happen.  It’s not to say or suggest that men aren’t as opportunistic as, I guess, we’ve always been because there are still a lot guys who just want the dick and nothing else and some would prefer not to have a lot of repeat business with any one guy… but I’m wondering if the push toward exclusivity and the change in the FWB dynamic is a sign of the times and the way male bisexuality will be handled going forward…

 

Today’s Bisexual Thoughts: Waxing Nostalgic

Every now and then I’ll stop the merry-go-round, get off, and take a look to see where I came from, where I am, and where I might be in some unknown future and, gulp, probably like a lot of older people, I often look at the way things used to be and determine if whatever I’m looking at was easier or harder than it is today and, yesterday – while chatting with Cityman about bisexuality – I had one of those moments and it’s almost unrecognizable from what I grew up experiencing.  The basic premise remains the same:  A guy finds or otherwise learns that he not only has an affinity for women but, whoa, he’s got an affinity for other guys and that affinity can be physical, emotional or some mixture of both.  Maybe he runs into another guy who has similar feelings and depending on how everything lines up and the age at which this affinity presents itself, they get around to having sex but even if they don’t, the seed has been planted.  It’s not so much about what a guy in this situation will or will not do as much as there was a… progression at work and one that’s actually so ancient that historians cannot pinpoint exactly when bisexuality became a thing for humans to engage in because it happened before there were written records and some of those records that did exist have been lost.

Today, I hear and read about guys talk about their desires in this and how difficult it is to express those desires; they have fears and other concerns that didn’t exist in that “back in the day” period for me, not that there weren’t fears and concerns mind you.  As one of many young bisexuals, there were two concerns:  Don’t ever get caught doing it with another boy and don’t get labeled as a faggot, queer, fairy, or sissy.  Just like today, you couldn’t tell what guys were on the same page with you but they were there and many weren’t too bashful about letting you know that if you were interested, they wouldn’t mind doing it with you.  Back in the day for me – and as I’ve mentioned a few times – the angst against homosexuals was pretty virulent and violent and no one wanted to be associated with homosexuals even though, duh, some of the sexual things being done were clearly homosexual.

Was it easier back in the late 1960’s than it is today?  I’d say it was and, as I’ve also written many times, it was just as simple as asking a guy some variation of, “Do you wanna do it?” and the answer was either yes, no, or occasionally, “I don’t know.”  How could you tell that a guy was into this or interested in it?  There was another question that got asked a lot:  “Have you ever done it with another boy?”  The possible answers were yes, no, and “I’ve thought about it…” but the usual response to this question would be along the lines of, “Why are you asking me this?”  And some guys weren’t shy about telling you exactly why they were asking although most guys would beat around the bush and tap dance like Fred Astaire before it became clear why they were asking.  If you ever heard, “If you show me yours, I’ll show you mine…,” it was a bit more than just being curious about what yours looked like compared to mine (although that, too, was the only  motive for wanting to look).  From there, it was simple:  You either wanted to do it or you didn’t and if you didn’t, it wasn’t that big of a deal.

If you did, in fact, want to do it, well, you just did it; from fondling each other to sucking each other to fucking each other with or without penetration.  Sure, it was pretty damned scary because chances were neither guy really knew what they were doing but, again, the biggest fear was getting caught “experimenting;” the moral atmosphere back then was very different and the results of getting caught were as mild as being on the receiving end of a scalding lecture or getting a beating of biblical proportions and while a lot of guys didn’t want to risk either of those consequences, many more were of a mind that you can’t get jacked up if you don’t get caught.

Or, “I won’t tell if you won’t, okay?”  Given the mindset of the times, you could be assured that no one was going to tell; oh, if asked if you’ve ever done it with another boy, the “proper” etiquette was to truthfully say yes (or lie and say no) but you never named the guy you did it with but there was an exception:  Names could be named if it was discovered that the two of you did it with the same guy, which was quite possible but even in that situation, the loop was closed at that point; even if some other guy asked the question and maybe dropped the name, you never confirmed or denied any knowledge of the named guy’s sexual preference.

It was all pretty much straight-forward in that you either wanted to or didn’t, you thought about it or you didn’t.  Let’s not forget that peer pressure usually played a role in one’s decision to do it or not – no one every wanted to be known as a chicken, scardy-cat, or a chump and in some cases, if you declined to do it, well, a rumor might get started saying that you were doing it anyway so the logic of the situation was like, “Well, since you put it that way, I might as well go ahead and do it…”  Some guys regretted it and, oddly, a lot of guys didn’t; who knew this was really a fun thing to do?

Today… oh, man.  Guys are worried about being outed – that hasn’t changed a whole lot – and they’re justifiably worried about catching something – that hasn’t changed a whole lot either – but while it was about the sex back in the day, today, eh, that’s not so much the case as one might think.  Oh, guys still want to do it with other guys… but it’s how they go about it that has, from my point of view, taken a right turn at Albuquerque.  Back then it was pretty much opportunistic and casual; just because two guys wanted to do it to each other didn’t mean anything other than they wanted to do it to each other; unless the guys involved were gay, none of this was about having feelings for each other outside of maybe friendship and while two guys would be happy to do it to each other and at every available opportunity, um, it’s not like they’re gonna be each other’s boyfriend; if anything, they were just two friends who were a bit more, ah, friendly with each other while no one else was paying attention, if you know what I mean.

Guys today have an angst against casual encounters because, apparently, just doing it with another guy and because it can be done doesn’t mean anything and they think that it should… but that’s because we’ve all been taught (or mind fucked, take your pick) that sex without investment serves no purpose and should never be pursued or engaged in… and as if being able to bust a nut with another guy lacks purpose or doesn’t have any meaning at all.  When a guy says that he can’t find another guy to do it with, what he’s really saying is that he can’t find a guy he can be into enough to have sex with.  Sure, there’s a safety factor here; it’s better to be able to find one guy to do it with than to be engaged with every swinging pud out there but I’ve been seeing that this… preference… isn’t as much about safety as it is appeasing one’s sensibilities.  Some guys pursue sex with other guys as if they’re pursuing women so they use the same approaches… which, at least to me, doesn’t make sense since, ah, the guy you’re trying to get into bed isn’t a woman.  Indeed, a lot of guys won’t engage at all because they don’t want to get into anything that looks like a relationship and, perhaps, without really understanding that obtaining a Friend with Benefits (FWB) is, in fact, a relationship.  They present themselves with a pretty problem:  They don’t want to have sex with another guy without some kind of investment in play but, at the same time, such an investment just ain’t gonna work for them.

Guys today are very specific about what they want to do, how they do it, who they do it with, etc.; back in the day, I can’t say there was a lot of thought about this aspect in that if you came across another guy who wanted to do it, that took care of the “problem” at hand.  Today, guys are tops or bottoms and, it seems, rarely versatile; back in the day, these things didn’t exist although I will admit that over time, a guy eventually learned what he liked the most and what he liked the least but today there are some guys who, without a lick of actual experience, decide that being a top or a bottom is what will work for them.  Guys develop a set of preferences and lock them up tighter than white on rice, like, some guys only want to do it Black guys and if you ask them why they wouldn’t do it with another white guy, chances are they wouldn’t be able to explain it.  Many guys are about big dicks… and really big dicks which, from my perspective, is a big departure from the way things used to be; back then, it really didn’t matter whether a guy had a big one or not – he just had to be willing to allow access to it and use it.  It didn’t matter whether the guy was cut or uncut, whether he was hairy or as smooth as a baby’s butt; it didn’t matter if the guy was short, skinny, fat, or somewhere in between;  hey, do you wanna do it?  You do?  Let’s go somewhere and do it!

And I won’t tell if you won’t.  Things like cuddling after sex were, frankly, unheard of except when it came to having sex with women.  Kissing?  Yuck!  It’s not that some guys didn’t give it a try but what one usually found out is why a lot of women say that men are lousy kissers but the mindset back in the day was that, sure, I’ll suck your dick and swallow your cum… ain’t gonna kiss you or cuddle with you after the fact.  Back in the day, there was no such animal as a guy who didn’t suck dick and even though there were guys who couldn’t deal with having a hard dick in their butt, well, there was an acceptable and even pleasurable alternative – they call it frotting or intercrural these days.  The point is that there was a sense of equality at work; if you wanted a guy to suck your dick, you were going to do some cock sucking as well and if you wanted to stick your weenie somewhere else, you were expected and required to submit to the same thing because it was just fair… and as much as that can mean when it comes to sex in general.  Today, there are guys who will suck cock… but don’t want to be sucked; there are guys who want to fuck you silly and will not, for any reason, submit to the same treatment.  Back in the day, there were no power games being played and none of that “I’m gonna make you my bitch!” shit that tends to be in play these days.  No face fucking, no gagging, no slapping the other guy around or any of the other “alpha” male shit that can some guys are really hyped about.

As Cityman and I talked about this, I had a great sense of sadness to see how guys have taken something that, in and of itself, isn’t all that complicated and have made it very complicated and to the point where they pretty much have assured themselves that if they wanted to experience sex with another guy, it’ll never happen.  As I mentioned, preferences get established – nothing all that unusual about this – but it’s how some guys strictly adhere to their preferences that often amazes me; they behave as if they’re somehow not allowed to change their minds or allowed to experience intimacy with another guy who might not fall into the narrow gap of their preferences… and then they wonder why they’re not having the experiences they think they should be having.  Over the decades, I’ve had guys ask me about my preferences and like everyone, I do have them… but.  Somewhere along the line, it became kinda apparent/obvious that if you wanted to have sex with another guy, the idea is to make it easier to accomplish this instead of making it harder so I learned to simply things:  Is he clean and healthy?  Agreeable to whatever wants to be done?  Is he my idea of an asshole?  If the answers are all yes, let’s do this thing; if one answer is no, sorry, homey, not interested but thanks for asking.  By comparison, you should ask a bi guy what it would take for him to get naked with another guy… and then pay attention to the conditions that are set and imposed and deemed inviolate.

I’ve said in past writings that I do, in face and in deed, get it:  I want what I want and the way I want it… which is fine but if you stick to this and you find that you’re not getting what you want, um, wouldn’t that kinda suggest that maybe, just maybe, ya might want to take a look at things and determine what’s preventing you from accomplishing the main goal here:  To have some kind of sex with another guy.  And the funny thing is that you can get a guy to agree with the logic of this… and they won’t change a thing about how they’re going about this… and keep complaining about not being able to do what they want to do.  Back in the day, the only thing that would stop two guys from doing it to each other was not being able to find a place to do it and, sure, some guys were pretty damned creative about that because in their minds, not having a nice place to do it wasn’t going to stop them from getting it done.

Simplicity has gone by the wayside and, if only in my opinion, has resulted in a situation where it’s easier to get a woman into bed with you (and we know how easy that ain’t).  Once upon a time, guys did it with other guys because it was so relatively and comparatively easy to do… but not today.  I look back and see all of this, shake my head over this and that, and keep moving forward.  Why?  Because it’s still important to understand this and from as many aspects as possible.  It’s not so much a matter of why guys want to do this as it is how they go about doing it and, often, how they fail and in a lot of cases, they’re being their own worst enemy while placing the blame elsewhere and all because they fail to simplify their approach to this.  Simple doesn’t mean being careless or just plain stupid about it but, again, it just makes sense to me that if you have a hankering to play with another guy’s cock, working toward making it easy to do makes more sense than making it damn near impossible to do.

And sometimes I wonder just what the fuck happened along the way that has caused things to turn out like this…

 

The Gaming Doldrums

I’m an avid gamer and while I don’t have a ton of games (compared to my son-in-law who has hundreds of games for his Xbox), I guess you reach a saturation point and while I have close to 100 games, there’s not a one of them I feel really hyped to play.  I’m still playing – I added Dead Space 3 and Forza Horizon 2 yesterday and took them out for a spin, played a little Minecraft and State of Decay 2 and even played an older game, Watch Dogs which I’ve finished several times already.  And I realized I was just playing them to have something to do and not necessarily because a game is very exciting to play.

I will admit that I was having a lot of fun playing Minecraft and putting a new theme through its paces… then Minecraft updated and the theme broke so its creator has been rushing to fix it and it took the fun right out of the game, well, at least until the theme has been updated so it won’t break any time soon.  One of the goals of State of Decay 2 is to destroy all of the plague hearts and enter into what’s call a legacy period; your leader has some special tasks to do and, upon completion of those tasks, you can go to the next phase of the game and you can select two other people from your community to go with you.  Sound really cool… but, in actuality, you’re just restarting the game in a new location and the only real perk is that whatever your selected characters are carrying, they get to keep it.

Otherwise, you’re starting over from scratch, which is a bummer given that throughout the first part of the game, you’ve been scrounging and scavenging for loads of stuff, building facilities and creating outposts to support your community – the one I had before the transition was nine characters strong and our home base was pretty secure and tricked out.  Only to find that in this legacy mode, I’m right back at the same place I started the game from (which was probably picked at random by the game).  The only good thing about this was I was already familiar with the area so I didn’t have to do a lot of thinking about where I could find supplies and other things and when the game told me to look for another place for us to live, I knew exactly where I was going, well, after I had to pick up two new recruits first.  And, oh, by the way – the plague hearts are back and after all I went through to destroy the originals – and the many characters who died in order to make that happen, yuck, I’m not messing with those damned plague hearts any time soon.

I have two gaming profiles on my Xbox One so that means that whatever games I have, I can play them with either profile.  Sounds redundant but for me this is a good thing because, at least in theory, I can play a game under my main profile, find all kinds of ways to fuck things up, then go to the game in my second profile and not make those mistakes.  So under my second profile, I’ve destroyed all of the plague hearts and started doing the legacy quests until I ran into one I don’t know what to do with:  I have to build a sniper tower to protect the base… and I don’t have anywhere to build it.   What it means is that I’m gonna have to tear down one of the facilities already in place and I’m not sure which one to tear down because I don’t know how many legacy tasks the game is going to throw at me and if I tear down the wrong one, my community might be in deep doo-doo.

But given what I know about this part of the game, I’d also say that it probably doesn’t – and won’t – matter which facility goes away because when the tasks are all completed, they’re gonna be left behind unless – and I just thought of this – I break them down, recoup the materials, and then move on to the next level of the game.  I might do this – not sure at this moment but I still feel like I don’t wanna be bothered with starting over from scratch again… and I already know there are two other areas of the game that I’m not particular fond of as a starting point.

Sure, I have two new games I can mess with but, again and overall, I’m not feeling it a whole lot.  I’ve played the other games in the Dead Space collection and they’re a bit insane; racing games can be fun and more so since I tend to crash a lot and even though I think of myself as being a seasoned video game car driver.  While giving Forza a test drive, um, my Lamborghini got airborne, flipped over about three times, and landed on its wheels and facing in the right direction; then with a BMW, I was passing one of the cars the game throws in your way, got a tire onto the dirt a little, and went for a crazy, spinning ride through a field.  Loads of fun if not a bit aggravating at times; I know it’s gonna take me a bit of time to get used to how the controller interacts with the cars and develop the right touch to go fast and not be a crash test dummy.  Normally, I’d look forward to the challenge… just not while I’m in the gaming doldrums.

Sometimes, you just don’t feel like playing your favorite games and while a new game will present an interesting challenge to learn it, bleh, sometimes that’s just too much like work.  The bad thing is that there doesn’t seem to be a time limit to the doldrums so it’s not like I can say that my gaming will be back to normal in a couple of days; maybe it will, maybe it won’t.  In Minecraft, I’m restoring yet another ocean monument using a theme that, in truth, I don’t use a lot – and just because I don’t use the theme a lot.  A couple of days ago, I ran into something I’ve never seen in the game:  A landlocked ocean monument.  Oh, sure, there was some water on the side but these things are usually totally submerged under water… and this one wasn’t.  It was, except for the very top of the monument, buried in debris and in such a way that I had to get creative in digging it out.  It got a little frustrating and I was on the verge of abandoning the project because I’m used to these things being underwater so I kinda messed up the boundary that had to be created between what water was there – as well as dam the various waterfalls that could cause a problem and, well, digging it out wasn’t easy… and then I discovered that the monument’s support columns were very different!  The top part of the monument was exactly as I expected to see and I actually stopped what digging I was doing so I could take a really good look at these “new” columns and figure out how they were constructed.

Did I mention this thing was landlocked in a swampy area and that even with a Potion of Night Vision, you can’t see underwater all that well?

And while I found this unexpected find to be challenging, I wasn’t exactly excited to do it… but since I started it, I had to finish it and the doldrums were urging me to just give up the restoration.  I kinda hate this because it takes the fun out of playing any game and I can’t wait to get out of this gaming funk…

 

Today’s Bisexual Thoughts: Only For the Young?

A while back, Oceanswater wrote a piece about twinks, usually (and generally) young males who could be bi or gay who sometimes wind up getting targeted by sexually aggressive and older men and not necessarily with the happy outcome some might expect.  In response to the piece she wrote, I wrote my take on this situation but since the two of us wrote about this, I’ve kinda been paying attention to how porn, that ancient bugaboo and scourge of moral righteousness hammers its influence into those who partake of this, ah, visual debauchery.  Now, this scribble isn’t about porn in and of itself; you either like it, tolerate it, or can’t stand it and none of these things change the fact that people from all walks of life do watch porn and for whatever reason works for them…

But what’s the message porn delivers to some folks?  One of them is that if you’re young, the world of sex is very much wide open to you and only limited to your sensibilities and we see examples of this every time we watch commercials on television; only the young and hip people drive the sexiest cars, douse themselves with the sexiest colognes and perfumes and other beauty aids, have the perfect family and home.  Only the young and extremely fit ever use high tech exercise equipment… but older folks need bladder leak protection, should buy certain types of life insurance, join AARP, consume dietary supplements as if their lives depend on them and should not only buy stock in Viagra or Cialis but take it religiously because you never know when one of those moments will be upon you, right?

You get the picture, don’t you?  You do?  Okay, let’s continue…

We know – or you sure as hell should know – that there’s a lot of age discrimination when it comes to sex, even in the world of M2M sex; you can be too young or too old and there’s no really clear defining line here since this tends to be a subjective thing rather than an objective one right along with the kinda obvious thing that there are young guys who prefer to be with much older men and those much older men preferring to be with someone who is, perhaps, younger than their own children or grandchildren – but old enough to legally consent to sex wherever they live.  Ideally, guys who wanna throw down with other guys will work within a range of ages that’s in the neighborhood of their own and usually no more than five years in either direction and I say “ideally” because if you were to talk to bi guys about this, you’d see that on the whole, some guys are all over the place about how old or young a guy has to be before anything sexual can be considered and undertaken and I’ve seen some guys walk a very narrow path in this and will reject candidates who are a year younger or older than they are.

There are older men, say in the age range of 40 to 70, who will not engage with anyone under the age of thirty, guys in the 30 to 40 range who won’t engage with someone in their 20’s… but might have a hankering for men in their 50s and above as well as those men in the 50 to 70 range who prefer someone their own age or, gasp, one of those strapping, buff, young (and sometimes very naive) 20-somethings.  A lot of those same 20-somethings will not, for love or money, drop their underwear for anyone who is as old as their father or grandfather so while as Oceanwater accurately wrote, there are a lot of these young, twinky guys who need to have that older man show them the ropes but it’s not one of those “universal” things – and it also must be noted that not all young guys are twinks as they’re portrayed – they’re all not seriously young, look like they need to go on a major food binge, and they’re all not pretty.

Porn, on the other hand, tends to focus on youth and vitality; as I seem to remember, I mentioned in the scribble I wrote about what Oceanswater wrote that while there’s porn that covers almost every age range and possible combination of young and old, you mostly see young and fit guys between the ages of 18 and 25 (and maybe, just maybe, as old as 30), all with really big dicks, having the time of their lives fucking each other silly.  Let’s not talk about the fact that you can see this kind of sex with these young and fit studs and with varying degrees of aggression and displays of dominance and submission and while this kind of “rough sex” doesn’t appeal to every guy, there are guys who’ll see this and decide that this is the way they want to have sex either as an aggressive and dominant top or a “meek” and submissive bottom who always appears to be oh, so happy to being subjected to what others would think of as punishment of a sort.

Guys on the forum are always talking about seeing pics of guys who are young, extremely fit and bearing large cocks; some admit to watching the differing genres of gay porn and while some are into the younger/older “daddy” thing, many more engage in age discrimination and, perhaps, without realizing that they’re doing it.  Some guys confess that they got with someone outside of their preferred age range and their before the fact thoughts were along the lines that if the other guy was “quite a bit” older, eh, they might not enjoy the sexual experience all that much – and sometimes they don’t and sometimes they cite the age difference as a reason why the sex they thought would be great turned out to be anything but.  Guys between the ages of 30 and 40 seem to be of a mind that going with a guy who’s 28 is a bit of a problem, often citing maturity issues and degrees of being clingy that they find disturbing and such citations tend to make me roll my eyes because, apparently, these guys have forgotten that it wasn’t all that long ago that they used to be in their twenties.

A lot of guys will pass over older men, not so much because of the younger/older taboo but cite issues like ED as being a major deterrent and, I’d suppose, assuming that a guy in his 50’s is not only going to have ED but will require a major infusion of ED drugs to get it up; that might be the case or it may not but as with a lot of this stuff, it’s the perception that’s more damaging than the truth and many guys miss out on the sex they fervently want to have because they’d rather believe the perceptions (and other bullshit) rather than to discover the truth for themselves.  I’ve heard guys say that they wouldn’t enjoy sex with a younger or older guy… but if you’ve never done it, how do you know you wouldn’t enjoy it?  And I’m thinking that the answer lies in what porn tends to show us and that’s a lot of young studs sowing their very wild oats with each other and seemingly without a care in the world.  Indeed, a lot of older men in the range of 40 to 70 feel the sting of this discrimination and many are of a mind that it’s not worth their time and effort to pursue guys from, say, 30 to 40 because, almost across the board, this demographic group is all about sticking with guys their own age and experience level, which is kinda interesting given that a lot of guys don’t hear and answer the call of cock until they’re in their late 30’s to early 40’s… so how much experience are they gonna have?

I see this subliminal but kinda in your face message:  If you’re not young, fit, and generously endowed, well, M2M sex isn’t for you and the sad part is that you can see indications and see cases where guys who are frustrated over not being able to get themselves some dick are, in fact, buying into this bit of fabrication.  Is it true that a lot of young men in their 20’s are jumping onto the M2M bandwagon?  Of course it is… but is it true that only this specific demographic group is have the best sex possible?  No, it isn’t – but it’s assumed and presumed to be the gospel truth.  Cityman, a dude in his early forties, often tells me of all the young, 20-something guys who check him out and/or practically beg him to come over and do the living daylights out of them and while he’ll admit that when he sees pics of these guys and find them nice to look at, when I ask him if he’d sleep with one, he balks – and I don’t find that to be all that unusual because, “historically,” those young 20-somethings cannot possibly possess the levels of maturity, sexual prowess, and experience that, say, someone my age can possess.  I know he’s gonna read this and think I’m picking on him (and he’d be right about that) but I’ve even talked with him and he’s mentioned that some late-60’s/early 70’s guy is interested in throwing it down with him and he thinks it’s cool that these older guys still have the desire to throw it down in some way… but when I ask him, “Why not go for it?  Who knows – homey might teach you a few things!” he does what a lot of guys do:  He balks, waffles, and tries to explain why getting naked with such an old guy wouldn’t be his idea of fun.

But if he never does it, how can he know it won’t be fun?  If you believe the hype – and you should never, ever believe it – the only guys having mind-blowing sex are between the ages of 18 and 35; they’re the ones sucking cock like it’s illegal (and in some states it is regardless of age albeit unenforceable) and taking tree trunk sized dicks in their butts with unbelievable ease and as a matter of course.  Perhaps it’s only my opinion but the age discrimination is clearly present and we just accept as fact that there are certain people within certain age groups who aren’t up to having sex in a meaningful way.  On the forum and among the guys who say that they just can’t find someone to have sex with, one of the delimiters is age which kinda makes sense but can often be, again, like the blind leading the blind given that there are a lot of newbies and guys sitting on the bench who have zero M2M experience and expecting someone their age to be experienced or, in some cases, their lack of experience is a good thing and someone older who does have quite a bit of experience in these things is kinda scary.

Sex isn’t just for the young and fit and this is something that we – collectively – should know… but things like TV commercials and petabytes of profession and amateur porn keeps sending the message that sex is only for the young and fit and in the world of M2M, the bigger the dick, the better.  Things like experience and overall mindset about sex often gets kicked to the curb and those things aren’t necessarily linked to age but, again, we should be aware of this but choose to not investigate the possibilities.

 

The Ocean Monument

The picture you see is the inside of an ocean monument in Minecraft.  The thing to note is the interior of the monument didn’t look like this when I found it; take away the patterns in the floor and all the lights that you see… then imagine, if you can, this entire space filled with “debris,” for lack of a better word.  Let me set the stage for ya…

Those of you who play Minecraft probably know about ocean monuments and, if so, you also know how hard they are to find and how hard they are to get to since they’re sitting at the bottom of the ocean and, in Survival mode, patrolled by guardians who pretty much kill anything that gets close to the monument.  I can’t say for certain but I know that when you create a new world, you can count on at least one of these things being present somewhere and I’ve seen up to three of them in one world.  In Creative mode, you can easily find the one closest to you – just invoke the /locate monument command and it’ll provide you the coordinates and you can teleport yourself there or, since you’re in Creative mode, fly to the coordinates.

The monument has a distinctive look and even if you happen to stumble across one while rowing a boat in the ocean or, gasp, bouncing along the water on your way to dry land, you can, at the least, see the sea lanterns at the very top of the monument.  Getting down to it is gonna be a problem if you don’t have the right stuff on you to prevent yourself from drowning – special potions and enchantments – and don’t forget that unless you’re in Survival/Peaceful mode, those guardians are waiting to fry you with… lasers.  Yeah, Minecraft is pretty much a low-tech kind of game except for the guardians’ weapon of choice.

The monuments, externally, are all the same; texture packs can change the way they look and, here lately, there’s a room at the top of the monument that seems to change its configuration and depending on the texture or world pack you’re using.  What’s the big deal?  Well, I’m glad you asked!  One of the monumental tasks (and, yes, the pun is intended) you can undertake is to make the interior of the ocean monument look like the picture I’ve provided but there are some things you gotta do, oh, like get rid of all of the water surrounding the monument, uncovering the monument to free it from all the debris it contains and is surrounding it, then restoring it to its former glory; what you do with it after you’ve done all of this is up to you and the picture tells you what I’ve been doing with them.  Other players have done some pretty cool things with the interior of these things and even I’ve thought of a few things I wanna try somewhere down the road.

“Okay, I see what you’re saying… what’s the problem?”

It’s simple:  In Survival mode (and not Peaceful), chances are that you’re going to drown, die, and wind up respawning again before you can erect a wall of some kind around the monument.  Some who tackle this use glass, glowstone lights, or sea lanterns and even whatever stones they can find… but whatever you use to build the containment wall, you’re going to need a lot of stuff to accomplish this while avoiding guardians and drowning which is why I’ve never attempted to drain one in Survival mode.  Minecraft purists would say that tackling an ocean monument in Creative mode is taking the easy way out but I can tell you that even in Creative mode and having access to every material the game has to offer, it’s not easy to do this and takes a lot of time to finish.  As an example, some folks that are on the game’s Facebook forum report that it takes them months to expose the monument to air; since I’m retired, I can spend a lot of time doing this (and provided I don’t have something else I need to do) and it takes me days to get the monument looking like the picture you see.

The first time I did this, I found myself overwhelmed by the task at hand; it looked “easy” but proved to be otherwise and even though I eventually finished the task, there were many times when I wanted to abandon it.  One of the things needed to do this is patience and another is perseverance.  Every time I decide to do this – and after I initially said I wasn’t gonna ever do this again, mind you – I take a deep breath and say to myself, “Okay, let’s get to work…” and begin the arduous task at hand.

First, I gotta examine the monument to see what kind of shape it’s in, particularly its support columns.  I recently discovered that those columns are 16 rows long from the bottom of the interior “ceiling” to the “floor”, completely trashing my thoughts that the columns were only six rows long.  So, the first thing is to dig down at every column until I’ve exposed the 16 rows and while I’m at it, restoring where the columns are missing its prismarine blocks.  As I dig down, I’m also digging out away from the monument to establish both a walkway and the point where I’ll start building the containment wall, which will go from the bottom of the monument to just above the surface of the water.  I recently expanded the walkway from two blocks wide to three, starting the containment wall at the fourth position; I have an idea for this extra space but actually haven’t worked it all out and compared to what’s next in this process, it’s insignificant at this point.

Building the containment wall literally takes thousands of whatever I’m using to create it – and maybe now you understand why I do this in Creative mode and not in Survival; there’s no way I can carry all that material and, in most cases, the monument is located in the “middle of nowhere” and without any land nearby.  I could use the material I’ve dug out to make the wall but even doing this initial work generates more material than I can carry; the good thing about Creative mode is that I can dig for days and not pile up material in my inventory.  The lights you see in the picture are sea lanterns and along with becoming the containment wall, they also provide light; again, Creative mode lets me use a potion that will “light up” things and they are needed because, as you might expect, without light, it’s pretty damned dark down there.  Every time I do this, I’m always trying to work out a more efficient way to create the wall but it’s still time consuming just the same.  Once I’ve located all of the columns and restored their outline on this one side (four across, sixteen down) as well as exposing the walkway and where I’ll start the wall, I’ll start laying down the sea lanterns on all four sides until the wall is level with the area just above where the columns begin.  Once I’ve built the wall to this point, I will fly around the monument and use sponges to seal off any gaps that lead to the interior of the monument; by doing this, it makes it “easy” to contain whatever water is inside the monument and, here lately, that’s not been a whole lot of water because it seems since the latest updates to the game, every monument I’ve come across has been filled to the top with garbage (I’ll get to this part in a moment).

So… the containment wall has been built to a certain point and gaps closed with sponges; the next step is to close the gap between the containment wall and the monument with sponges which seals off the bottom of the monument from the rest of the water.  Once this is done, I remove a corner sponge and “dive down” into this space, replacing the sponge I took out… and now it’s time to get rid of the water that’s been trapped in this space.  Using sponges makes this easy but it’s still a bit of work to keep flying around the monument and sponging up the water; the game’s creators have improved the physics the game employs, i.e., the water has currents and it “moves” and this alone can make getting rid of the water interesting because it keeps pushing me out of the way and other annoying things.  It might take me, oh, maybe twenty minutes to soak up all the water in this space but once it’s done, I now have a dry space to work in and it’s on to the next step: Cleaning out the interior of the monument.

This can take days for me to do and more so since, as I mentioned, all the monuments seem to be be filled to the brim with junk and there’s no easy or simple way to get rid of it outside of maybe a command you can use; I know it exists but I don’t know how to use it.  That means clearing out whatever’s inside the monument the hard way – one row of junk at a time.  It is monotonous work; not only do I have to clear out all of the junk inside, but I also have to remove all of the junk that’s in the five rows between each column to expose them on all four sides.  At one point, I though about using TNT to get rid of as much of the junk possible… except, um, I have a tendency to use more TNT than I need and the last thing I wanna do is do any more damage to the monument than already exists.  To keep from putting myself to sleep with this repetitive work, I’ll section off areas, cutting a huge area of junk into more manageable areas and whittling them down until there’s nothing but clear floor and all columns are fully exposed.  Next, restore all of the columns.

This is kinda/sorta easy since they’re all made out of the same material – those prismarine bricks I mentioned but it’s time consuming to fly around each column and replacing whatever’s there with the bricks; while I’m doing this, I’m thinking about the floor and what I want to do with it.  My latest thing is the pattern you see in the picture but once the floor has been fully exposed, you’re only limited by your imagination when it comes to how you want it to look.  As I restore each column, I’m also adding the lights you see on each column, as well as lights along the ceiling; the “see in the dark” potion only lasts eight minutes (and I usually go through about 100 of potions just doing this part) so the lights become a necessity.  Once the columns have been restored and lights placed, it’s time to work on the floor and in whatever way that’s come to my mind; compared to everything else I’ve done to this point, doing the floor is quite easy… but there’s still a lot of work to do.

After the interior has been done to my liking, it’s time to leave this dry and lighted space and go swimming to finish the containment wall – but taking a moment to go to one area of the monument and seal it off with sponges.  To break the monotony, I’ll actually seal myself inside this rather large and maze-like space so I can sponge up all of the water inside; that can take an hour or more and employ the use of thousands of sponges.  Getting rid of all the water in this interior space is a pain in the ass… but not even as bad as the next step:

Getting rid of all of the water trapped within the containment area.  Some of the other players who tackle this use sand to sop up all the water in this space and I even thought about using sand myself… except what you’re really doing is replacing all of the water with blocks of sand that, eventually, will also have to be removed.  It’s too much of a pain for me to calculate the volume of water to be removed; oh, I can do it and I know the math involved… it makes my head hurt so I try not to think about it.  By using sponges, I don’t have to fill the whole space with them (and like I stupidly did the first time I did this) and I keep working on more efficient ways to use the sponges so that I get rid of all the water but makes removing used sponges not so much of a chore.  My latest thing is to quarter off the top area of the monument by creating walls of sponges; from there, it’s a matter of laying down rows of sponges in an area, slowly but surely lowering the water level and removing used sponges – it’s easy to get rid of them as I go along than to leave all of those sponges in place and cleaning them up later.  It’s almost painfully time consuming and the water isn’t making it easy to move around as it buffets me here and there, making flying around underwater not so easy.  To remove all of the water from the four sections can take hours as well but the way I do it, for now, seems easier and less painful that filling this huge space with blocks of sand.  Now, in Creative mode, I’d never run out of sand… but if you can, try to imagine how much sand you’d need to fill this space that’s maybe sixty rows high on all four sides and maybe fifty rows high and above where I’d already sealed off the bottom of the monument.  Do the math – I refuse to but trust me when I say this is a lot of space to fill and even more sand that has to be used, recovered, and reused until all of the water is gone.

As much as I want to see exactly how much sand is needed to do this, nope, no frigging way I’m doing that; it just makes a hard thing to do even harder in my opinion.

It takes me days to do this in Creative mode; in Survival mode I don’t know – or want to know – how long it would take me but, like I said, some Facebook forum members report that it takes them months doing this because, of course, they don’t have the time to constantly work at this due to work, school, and other things.  The bad and maybe even funny part is that every time I do this, I tell myself that this will be the last time I work a monument and, indeed, as I explore the world, I might run across another monument; I’ll see it, remember what I just went through doing the other one, and just pass it by.  Even when I create new worlds I don’t go looking for them any more but, um, sheesh, if I happen to stumble across one, fuck, why not – let’s work this one anyway; maybe I can think of better ways to uncover one that won’t take three or four days to complete.

Other than making oceans of lava disappear, I think this is one of the hardest things one can undertake in the game and especially in Survival mode.  It makes battling the mobs of bad guys look easy and carefree and the only places in the game that I think could be a lot worse are the Nether and the End World.  Getting to the Nether is easy – just build a portal… and then hope that once you step through it, you don’t find yourself plummeting to your death, which has happened to me more times than I want to admit to.  The End World isn’t so easy to get to; first you have to find a stronghold – which may be under a village or not; you have to navigate the stronghold and it’s a maze and even when you find the End Portal, you need certain items to activate it and those items aren’t easy to come across in Survival mode.

But those last two places are for another discussion.  Why go through the hassle of exposing an ocean monument to air and doing other stuff with it?  Because it’s there.  It will test your patience and your ability to stick to the job once you’ve started it and while there’s no Xbox achievement for doing this, I tend to get a great sense of accomplishment doing this.  I currently have 44 worlds I’ve created and have messed around in and I’ve not bothered to work at least one monument in every world because, um, I’m not that patient and, really, if you’ve done one of them, you’ve pretty much done all of them outside of whatever additions you might make, like as you see in the picture.  I actually have a video of one monument I completed with the help of my son-in-law; while I was working the inside parts, he was building additions to the monument that, honestly,  I never thought about doing.  Sadly, WordPress won’t let me include the MP4 video in this post, which is a damned shame because the completed and modified monument is, in my opinion, spectacularly pretty thanks to my son-in-law’s work.

Still, as much as doing this can be a major pain in the ass, I actually find it relaxing as I methodically do the work; I’ve done this so many times now that I’m not really thinking about what I’m doing outside of the logistics of getting it done and, yeah, a downside is that it can be so monotonous that I’ve found myself starting to nod off from time to time.  As I work, I do think about some stuff, like, how many blocks really make up the containment wall and, at the least, thinking about the math required to compute the exact volume of space inside the containment wall; I think about how many bricks actually make up the columns including the blocks on the inside; the columns are actually “solid” blocks of prismarine bricks; each row contains 16 blocks and there are 16 rows down to the floor and, if memory serves me, there are 25 columns – again, if you wanna do the math, be my guest.  But as I’m thinking about stuff like this (and refusing to do the math), I’m methodically getting it done and I always seem to surprise myself to find that I’m done doing something.

Those of you who play Minecraft and have done this know what I’m talking about; those of you who don’t play the game, well, um, if you ever choose to play it – and I’m not saying that you shouldn’t play Minecraft (it’s actually pretty addictive), if you ever come across an ocean monument, ya might think twice about tackling one and more so if you don’t have the time or the patience to do so but, then again, if you need to work on being focused and being more patient, this’ll be the thing you wanna try to accomplish…

Provided you don’t drown first or get killed by guardians, of course – I did mention this earlier, didn’t I?