Sell! Sell!

200,000. Wow. It's been years in the making, but from humble beginnings many good things come. Late yesterday afternoon we had visitor number 200,000 cross our threshold here at From The Ashes HQ. I know nothing about him or her except he/she was from the UK and didn't stay very long at all. I assume he was dissatisfied with what he found as he came to me via a search titled "party favor cum slut". And while I like to consider myself accommodating there are limits...

According to the stats I get, my little corner of the bloguverse gets read on six continents. And while the bulk of my readers are in fact from the US, we get visitors from at least 23 countries. Hello Malaysia! Of course, it's also true that I get a lot of visitors from the oddest searches in words and images, but I attribute that to my wondrously perv ... er, diverse interests. To wit:

"eminen nude"
"tied up and fucked"
"fat fuck" (The NUMBER ONE search!)
"soccer pee"
"robbie williams armpit"
"nude blood"
"dragged naked"
"weird boob"
"well hung canadian men" (as if!)
"shaved pubic hair designs"

and the ever-popular
"flying cumshot"

My readers are freaks, y'all! But you're my freaks and you are loved.

Seriously, I started this blog almost as a lifeline. I had been diagnosed with HIV. I was depressed, suffering from serious panic disorder, in need of some therapy. I now know I was alcoholic. I felt lost and completely alone. With nowhere else to turn I launched myself into this new form of expression without a clue as to what it would lead to. I decided very early on that if this idea was going to work or be worth doing, that I would have to try my best to remain brutally honest and unflinchingly unafraid of the consequences. As it turns out, it became like a trail of bread crumbs out of a very dark forest. In some ways, I think this blog may have saved my life.

Today (at least) I am sober. I have been faithfully and successfully treating my HIV and my overall health is amazing. My mental health, well ... I guess that depends on who you ask. But I certainly don't feel as crazy. Along the way, my reasons for writing have evolved. I decided that I would try to concentrate on informing people about HIV treatment and issues whenever I could, hopefully without being strident or preachy. I tried to make sure that I kept a good accounting of what I experienced through diagnosis and treatment. My hope was that sometime someone who was just beginning that journey would come here and find some useful information and not be as scared. I also wanted to reflect that while being HIV+ was a big part of my life, I also maintained many other interests, distractions and obsessions. I love weird news, outrageous behavior, snarky sarcasm, and true New York stories. Whenever possible, I tried to share that with you.

All is not perfect, if such a thing is even possible. I've recently discovered I have a lot of work to do on my journey of sobriety. Let's just say I'm seriously stumbling over some of the 12 Steps. I've made some great strides on the road to self-acceptance, but discovering who I am, where I came from, and where to go from here seems endless. And that's good, I think. I'm a single gay man with HIV that left 40 officially in the dust. My prospects of ever finding a man to share my life with grow exponentially dimmer with each passing month. I am almost as socially retarded as I was when I started this. I am 20 short years away from retirement and as it stands now I'm looking forward to a twilight of Social Security and dinners of cat food.

In short, while I have toyed with the notion that it might be time to end this chronicle, all indications are that there's still some tragic ore to be mined from the cave I've dug for my life. When all is said and done, I feel I haven't said or done it all yet.

In other words: I'm not finished. We still have some roads to travel. I'd be pleased if we could still go down some of them together.

You comin'? ...