The New Neighbour

This week I'm just finishing off a few things like ditching one site that promised much but really didn't do anything me while I'm just back from spending time out in Grey shorts with minus 1 degrees temperatures!

Thinking really about what boyhood was really about, not least when in my junior years we had an influx of new boys as the estate was being built rather those we'd grown up with from the first weeks of infants and even the Play Group our Mums had all enrolled us in I saw this beautiful poem.

All right in this country most of us don't play Baseball although I do like to watch it but for us going down the lane bouncing your football towards the park or a patch of open land has the same feel.

You do have that he's the New Kid in town feel and maybe go over to him and open up a conversation and perhaps offer to be friends.

Sadly you can oh so easily tell the boys who's without any close friends but you know it's our responsibility to make him an offer. 

Until next week, Bye!

Forumitus or The stuff on a Mods mind

There were a few things on my mind last week that I do happen to feel like talking about  and one of them is the difference between boys that may have a more feminine side that they feel the need to express and  sissies.

The first thing to say is that "sissy" is not in any way at all a gender and really is more of a submissive trope that often involves humiliation of a sexual kind  where on the one hand they are told they are not a male  but then told they are inferior to and must be dominated by alpha females.

Such humiliation may be verbal, physical or mental and has no place with LGTQI community as  a gender. To be blunt it is a kink.

That is the #1 reason we will NEVER allow such content and promoters of at the forum.

There are people who while feeling that their gender is male to the point they would not be looking at transitioning as female who may like to either do things usually associated more with feminine interests or to wear skirted attire.

I'm less than convinced that unless you personally have felt that need you yourself would get it but just being able to is all they are looking for, no changes in pronouns, just being able to the whole person as they feel it.

Those people have little if anything to do the first set and if they were growing up from the fifties to the nineties most likely would of experienced name calling including from people who should know better such as teachers and felt threatened at times.

Because you may not understand something doesn't make it okay to be dismissive of a person with it.

I have time for them and if at any point felt that way I would too.

The other point is I do lack time for people only seem to last a few weeks, get into a conflict, leave and then return undercover hiding as someone else especially when they have broken forum rules.

Some people seem to be unable to see that "truth will out" as people identify posting style, past expressions and titbits of information as one person got found out at two very different sites this week.

People do notice these things and I can't help but remark on the futility of that. 

Any wish to return really ought to be discussed with site crew and if of necessity it involves a need to make a new account that should be disclosed so people know who they are engaging with.

Playing the part

We wouldn't normally talk music on here and it is rare on the other blogs but when looking at this whole like a schoolboy thing especially presentationally, the persona of Angus Young of the Hard Rock band AC/DC was certainly one the first public instances of seeing an adult dressed as a schoolboy.

It did not escape my attentions as a fourteen year old who clearly had some age dysphoric traits even then that at least some "men" did dress as the kind of schoolboy I preferred to be dressed as even if may of been seen as an outlandish stunt and a nod to teenage rebellion in the punk era to which they were for a period associated with before "Heavy Metal" as a scene that was written up in Sounds and the N.M.E magazines we bought with concerts and a pub circuit that served patrons was a thing.

AC/DC's music to me was more blues boogie in influence even if the lyrics played up to the mindset of  adolescent boys than anything else not least with tracks like Whole Lotta Rosie. 

His existence encouraged me to reclaim part of what it meant to be the kind of schoolboy I was on the inside fighting the mini adult versions others were pushing and over time made it easier to get bigger fitting school uniforms as tribute bands and fans alike bought the look.

It also has hasn't dented Australian Boys liking for wearing shorts based school uniforms which is the kind of comment some make when some of us talk about our liking of it for our own reasons as if we'd uncool it out of existence.

Thanks a bunch Angus!

Families

Some days things just come crashing to you,  a bit of the past that jolts you as if a meteor struck you as you were just walking along the pavement.

It was really about some thoughts that I had with my second best friend at high school at the time, she faced a lot of physical challenges in her life but she had hours of time to try to understand me and we were chatting would of been early 1982 about tv and what we saw mattered to us.

You know, the kind of totally random teen stuff that actually in hindsight was really pretty significant for how I saw and felt.

Let me explain. On commercial tv there was a long running American tv show about family life across the decades called The Waltons that featured this extended family sharing lifes ups and down together in rural Virginia, and the head of the family John Walton Snr, operated a lumber mill and supplemented their income with a small-scale farming. They took in people and shared a lot as a family united, attending church on Sundays.

That's probably was much as I need to say for the purposes of this entry as I'm not writing a essay on the series or anything as it's what's in more modern parlance a "Slice of life" series seeing the family grow and change over time in accordance with events such as the Great Depression, WW2, the Great Society and Civil Rights  era and so on.

The thing Linda and I were discussing was Family: what it means to be in a family, our involvement or interaction if you like with with Mum and Dad, your immediate siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles. The extent it is a 'unit' and all that.

We were also comparing and contrasting our own relationships  with our families to what we had been watching.

In a lot of ways she saw many parallels  between that of how she cared for them as much as they had to do quite a lot for her and the fictional family we saw.

I once said half joking to Denise one breaktime If it was like mine, then everybody would be off doing totally their own thing, with Mum trying to hold the thing together and me behind a chair on the edge of a nervous breakdown.

That may sound kinda melodramatic but there was and still is the lack of bonds between everybody, no real sense of feeling for one another, for me it wasn't a place of safety with one sibling who'd think nothing of verbally and financially abusing me which wasn't really helped by my being able to spot in seconds any outright lies he was telling to get more for himself as he felt hard done to and obliged to report it.

That's before you bring in Dad who'd explode at the slightest thing, throwing stuff across the room, propelling me in a chair into corners like trash, threatening to burn down the house.

You see, that's the big comparison  between what family was like for her and for me and to open about this really hurt.

This whole experience left a big legacy with me, not least a very strong feeling of longing, almost desperation to loved and cared for.

What I wanted so much was physical and emotional intimacy, a feeling beyond mere words of what it means to 'belong', to be bonded and have bonds that outlast their very beginnings, that provide emotional comfort promoting personal confidence and development.

A relationship that would teach me what I needed to know to get by with people, to be able contribute to it, helping me to stand on my own two feet as a grounded individual within the wider unit.

A wider unit that shared a common purpose, the raising of and looking after that family that was prepared discipline me in a loving, structured, affectionate way so fulfilled my role and expectations within it and our wider community.

I wanted to be...in the Waltons family.