Acetylene Eyes was born a year ago today.

To begin, I want to thank my followers. I’d be doing this even without you, but it is far more rewarding with you here: thank you.

Motivations & Hindsight

When asked why they do what they do Godspeed You! Black Emperor gave the following explanation:

“We play for the kids in the front row because we used to be the kids in the front row.”

This sentiment eviscerates all the pretense, all the art for arts sake bullshit & fixes the whole strum und drang to a noble, perhaps naive economy of gratitude: the overwhelming desire to give back some of the beauty that’s sustained you through the shit & piss & horror, horror, horror.

It’s the self-same sentiment that inspired Acetylene Eyes. Well, that and the fact that from a very early age I’ve been both exceedingly visual & insatiably curious about sexuality making a collision with explicit imagery inevitable.

My first encounter with porn was exquisite. & if it hadn’t been so unique, I probably would’ve washed my hands of the whole thing.

But you play it as it lays. It was already under my skin. I’d seek out explicit images hoping they might hold some of the same light as those illicit Polaroids. Without fail I’d find myself reduced to a warm, wet quivering mess by the staggeringly beautiful sexual capacity of the body while at the same time feeling repulsed by what I can only think to call a lack of appropriate reverence for the proceedings. I’d cover my eyes with my hands but no matter how much I wanted not to look or how much what I had already seen made me feel alienated from my body, I always peaked out from between my fingers.

For both good & ill this desire to look in spite of the consequences has played arguably the biggest role in defining who I am today.

A year ago, I was beginning my yearly descent into the hell of seasonal depression. Creatively, I was stagnant: I hadn’t made a photograph in months & my case writer’s block felt terminal.

After four hours of staring at a blank Word document, I’d end up trawling the internet. Despite not having an account, I unofficially followed a half-dozen Tumblr sex blogs.

What I saw surprised me.

Not all the images, not even most, but some of the smut put me off less.

I really didn’t set out with any misplaced vanity that I could do the whole sex blog thing better; I merely knew I could do it different.

For example: I had zero interest in perpetuating another carefully curated record of consumption in an effort to ‘self-define’ by projecting preference and taste. (Read: fuck if I was gonna be another lame-ass mass re-blogger.)

The second thing was the realization that I had fuck all to offer in the way of original content. After all participation is not equal to contribution. & I wanted to make something, to give back. Not just to the blogs that gave me glimpses of what I had been waiting for but although I didn’t see it at the time, it presented a way to give something back, if not to my actual fourteen year-old self, then to some other confused, very alone fourteen year-old. (Note: if you are not 18+, you can’t legally view this blog. & yes, only saying that to cover my ass. No, I won’t know if you are looking anyway.)

But as someone much wiser than me once advised me: the great end in life is not having your questions answered, it’s learning to ask better questions.

Moving Forward

I’d love to be able to promise a post a day in year two. Honestly, it’s not that easy. As terse and still unfocused as some of my writing is, it sometimes takes me six hours to put together 250 words of commentary. Words are slippery stubborn things & there almost always exists a vast rift between what I want to convey and what I manage.

That said, my goal is 250 posts this year.

Toward this end, I am hoping to have at least six (6) guest curators. (Year One’s only guest curator, azura09, did a wonderful job. Plus, guests curation encourages a plurality of perspectives–something I feel to be of vital importance.)

There are several other things I have in the works. But they aren’t quite solid enough to share yet & I’d rather not jinx them.

Lastly, with a few notable exceptions, I have kept this project a secret from my friends. I’ll be outing myself today. I’ll likely lose a few people. But if they are offended by this, they weren’t really doing me much good were they?

Stats

At present, I follow 60 blogs. To put that in practical terms, I scan an average of 600 images almost every morning. Weekends: it’s closer to 1000.

A fair ballpark estimate would be that I’ve scanned 200,000 something images over the last year.

Of those 200,000 images, I’ve marked 1350 ‘likes’, or: 6.75% of all the images I scanned this year.

Content is culled from liked posts. As it stands–just shy of 200 posts to date (roughly a post every day-and-a-half)–15% of likes become posts.

Thus, approximately 0.1% of the total images scanned this year became posts. (In reality, it’s probably closer to 0.05% once you figure in text posts and original content.)