Spike's Boys....my first blog

Ok, I've been doing Spike's Boys for more than a year now, and often wondered if I should also write more.....I've injected a comment or two, but largely have not offered any opinions and have attempted not to clutter it up with text. That blog was started for two reasons.



First, my wonderful dog, Spike, had just recently been diagnosed with bladder cancer.....I was sitting around one day feeling wistful about Spike and looking for something to do on the computer.

Here's Spike

Second, I'd heard about this 'blog' phenonmenon, but really hadn't paid it that much attention, so I decided to poke around to see what was out there. Largely, what I found sort of bored me....musings from a lot of people that I didn't know or care about. I found several that were basically diaries, and a few that were people going through a trauma of their own, and writing about it for their own purposes....and to help anyone else who might happen upon it. I also found others that were about specific subjects, such as a particular TV show, sports, Brad Pitt, etc.


So on the spot, I decided a few things. I would start up a blog to learn how to do it and see if it's something that amused me enough to keep it up, would pick a subject that is easy to keep going, and I would dedicate it to Spike.



So....what interests me....what do I do mostly when I'm poking around on the net. Look for cute guys. I had a fairly sizable folder of pictures and porn I'd found on the net one way or another. Mostly I used it as a screensaver for my computer screens. So for my blog subject, I picked essentially, pictures of men. I hesitate to call it porn because if you spend any time on Spike's Boys, you'll see that there is not a ton of nudity or gratuitous sex. Oh, it's definitely there, but it is not my focus. My focus for that blog is simply men that I find extremely attractive in one way or another. It can be an Arm muscle, a face, something they are wearing, or just a gorgeous man. Each posting is themed to whatever amuses me that day, and I picked the overall theme of 'boys' to tie it together.


The theme of 'boys' has limited me a bit because I put that into the title of each posting, and coming up with new clever ones isn't easy. But I do my best to keep it interesting for myself, and now for others since some people seem to enjoy visiting (have had about 150k hits at this point.)

More limiting than the theme though was organization over time. I've now done about 125 postings in the last year and two months, and each posting is 15 pictures (blogspot lets you upload 5 at a time, and that seemed like a good number.) That's approaching 2000 pictures and I've done my best not to repeat. That became harder and harder over time, so now I'm in the process of moving my pics on my computer into 'used' subdirectories. I do a ton of surfing for new pics all the time, and I keep them somewhat organized by categorizing them as I find them into a subdirectory structure similar to the blog. That organization started when I started the blog (I already had several hundred pictures before starting it, all unorganized.)

Geez, I'm already boring MYSELF....

Ok, so who is Spike? To know Spike and his brothers, you have to hear a bit of history of me. I'm a 47 year-old gay man who has never truly been comfortable with himself. I'm sure I'll tell more of this another time, but essentially, when I was 29, I met two guys that had been a couple for 10 years, Jim and George. Eventually we started a threesome which lasted another 7 years before George and I split off on our own.

Jim and I started as friends and he did a lot for me as a person, but we had a terrible time because he brought out the arguer in me for some reason. By nature, I'm not argumentative at all, but for some reason, he and I fought like cats and dogs (and I almost never won an argument because he's GOOD at it.) For our first three years, I essentially moved into their place, and in 1994, we decided to buy a place together, all three of us. I grew up with dogs and was absolutely insistant that I WOULD have one when I owned a place. Jim was dead set against having a dog in the house. We knew it was an issue....but we proceeded anyway.

Fast forward to about a month before closing on the house we found on Capital Hill. We had an ornery owner to deal with....all of us were in the house together and the owner was being an Ass about something....and the next thing I know, Jim is gone from the house, out the front door. About 30 minutes later, he comes running into the house saying 'oh you have to come see the puppies!!!' He had noticed the new next door neighbor in the yard and went out to talk to him. The neighbor's Jack Russell had recently had puppies, so he invited Jim in to see them, and Jim fell in love. Next thing I know, Jim is insisting that we EACH had to have a puppy....lol. 'Oh, three is no harder than one!', he tells us. (He can rationalize absolutely anything in his head.) Well, I had just averted a very difficult argument, so I went along because I was going to have my dog.

Spike Bruiser and Skippy



Well, as these things happen, I got three dogs as I have always been their primary caretaker and disciplinarian.

So of course, we had to decide on names for our three new puppies (we were only assured of two of the 5 as they were keeping one (Scamp), one was definitely spoken for (Nardo....the long lost brother as we never saw him again) and a third was possibly taken....but we ended up with three of them living next door to their mother (Lady) and brother. We wanted a theme for the names....Hewey, Dewey and Louis or something silly, without being silly...lol. Finally we decided that since Jack Russell Terriers are little dogs who don't have a clue that they are little, we'd use big names, and decided on Butch, Spike and Killer.

Well, the first one born was the biggest and the first one to push his brothers aside (yes, she had 5 boys) to get to the milk.....he was a baby bully and the owners named him first, and called him Bruiser. Well, that fit the theme just great, so it became Bruiser, Spike and Killer.

Jim being Jim, decided that each of us owned only one of them, and somehow it became Jim owns Bruiser, I own Spike, and Killer belonged to George. George is the world's sweetest person (I'm sure I'll have more on him later), and just couldn't call that dog, who was the runt of the litter, Killer. After 2-3 weeks of waffling, I finally said, 'ok the dog needs a name, if you can't call him Killer than NAME HIM SOMETHING.'....and George says, ok, lets name him Skippy.

Well, thank you very much for ruining our THEME! But he was right, Skippy turned out to be more of a Skippy and he grew into the name. Killer would've been all wrong, and it makes for a good story :).

These dogs are truly special to us and I'm sure I'll write more about them at another time. As a gay man with no children, my animals become my children. I also have two cats, Rachi (pronounced Rocky and short for Rachmaninov) and Copeland.