tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-184409432024-03-23T14:05:33.137-04:00 The Heron ClanUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger1604125truetag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18440943.post-64534407783940347832021-03-28T15:59:00.000-04:002021-03-28T15:59:31.122-04:00Decency<p> <span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">I was raised by my WWII veteran father, and my mother who was seven years his junior. They both bore the marks of the great depression. There was an inherent decency to their generation; a willingness to reach out and lend a hand. They helped their neighbors with whatever was needed: childcare, a yard project, sitting with a family in grief, dropping off a meal when someone was ill… whatever might be needed. Their skills and their hearts seemed to be able to reach well beyond our own walls and our own front door. We didn’t always have a lot, but we always seemed to be able to make what we did have stretch far enough to help someone else. My folks were eminently decent people. It feels like times have changed in this America.</span></p><span id="docs-internal-guid-890d0fba-7fff-287e-f40b-2d10abfe8f92"><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Over the last few months, as a whole host of awful disasters have rolled across my television screen, I have been struck by a single overarching thought: how is it that we have come to lose our sense of decency?</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When a screaming, destructive, murderous mob breaks down the barricades to storm into our capital, and attempt to stop the constitutionally defined process of certifying the result of a duly conducted national election, where is the outraged reaction of decent people?</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When a winter storm knocks out the power, plunging thousands of people into cold and dark, and then leaves those same people without potable water for weeks; when the United States senator who represents those same people picks up and leaves for a family vacation in Mexico while his constituents are suffering and dying; when the power companies that couldn’t manage to keep the lights on then churn out bills for thousands of dollars to customers who froze in the dark; does that seem decent?</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When, again, our evening news broadcasts are completely pre-empted by word of our neighbors being murdered while doing regular things, in places like Atlanta, Georgia and Boulder, Colorado by young men who no one would have even noticed on the day before, there is something terribly indecent happening. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When, in 43 states, here in a nation that is founded on the notion that we operate by the power of our vote, state legislatures are working to pass laws that remove that right to vote from their own citizens, a powerful indecency is occurring on a daily and hourly basis. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When we have established an immigration system that declares that it is illegal to offer aid to a mother who arrives on our doorstep carrying her child, fleeing from violence and poverty, where is our humanity and our decency?</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And, when after a year when more than half a million of our neighbors and family members have been lost to a deadly virus, we still cannot do the simplest things to protect one another, like wear a mask and keep our distance for just a few more months. Instead, great crowds of partiers are gathered for spring break, as if there were no threat; as if no one had died; as if it simply doesn’t matter. It is indecent.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A society and a civilization stands on a number of things, but foremost among those, it seems to me is the ability to count on the good will and good faith of your fellows. We need to be able to trust that the people that we meet in our shops and our workplaces and our schools are basically decent sorts. It is simply a fact that life is a risky proposition. For each and every one of us, disaster is a heartbeat away, and we rely at some level on the good graces of our fellow citizens to hold us up in our hour of need. We hope that our neighbors and co-workers and friends will show up with a helping hand and a casserole to shovel the sidewalks and take care of the kids and walk our dogs and sit at our bedsides and comfort our widows and do all the thousand kind things that knit us all together. It is just decent. We don’t expect to be kicked while we are down, and we never intend to be the ones doing the kicking. We just are not that sort of people, except that, as it turns out… maybe we are. Really, what has become of us? Have we changed, or is this who we have always been?</span></p><div><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sue</span></div></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18440943.post-80810595999733669202021-03-17T23:38:00.000-04:002021-03-17T23:38:04.687-04:00Reclaiming Myself<p> <span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">I was a school teacher for thirty-five years. I loved the work. I loved my kids. I was pretty good at it, I think. Sometimes, in some small ways, I made a difference.</span></p><span id="docs-internal-guid-3ba75f76-7fff-33a5-718b-a9ea46952d05"><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I had no teaching credential. All of my own educational background was in science, engineering, mathematics, and computer programming. When I left a seventeen year long career in the oil and gas and mineral extraction industries, I was determined not to go back to that work. I had found it to be soul destroying. On a long shot, I applied for the computer instructor position at the Catholic elementary school that I had attended as a child, and because it was the middle of the year, and they were in a desperate situation, they hired me to begin on two-weeks notice after the Christmas holiday. I put together a program for 3rd through 8th grades from almost nothing, and taught there for a number of years. I learned to teach by teaching. I watched my kids. I listened to them, and if something didn’t work, I didn’t do it again. They taught me way more than I ever did teach them. In time, I moved into a 5th grade homeroom class, teaching math, and science, and religion of all things. Then, I moved away to Ohio, and in time, I came to teach middle school math and science. For about half of the time I taught, I was divorced, and that was my persona: the middle school teacher lady who lived alone with her cats. I kept to myself, and kept my life pretty seriously private. I devoted myself to my work and my kids, and people knew only what they could see of me; which wasn’t much.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">That lack of a state issued teaching credential kept me tied to the Catholic school system, and because I needed the work, I danced to their tune. I almost always taught science, even when I might also be teaching some math classes or some social studies classes or even some religion classes. I taught science with a sincere passion and love for the subject, and I wanted my students to love it too. I wanted them to sense the connectedness of it all; to understand how they fit into all of it; how beautiful it all was. I taught the Big Bang and I taught Darwin’s evolution through natural selection and I taught climate change, even when doing that caused me to raise the eyebrows of the higher-ups and the church hierarchy. Through much of the last decade of my career I taught a health curriculum that included sex education. Although constrained by the limits of the Catholic church’s teachings, I did my level best to give my kids as much as I could of a healthy and positive education about their bodies and their sexuality, even in the face of resistance from some parents and the parish priest. That work ultimately led to my untimely retirement from the teaching profession when I simply could not accede to demands that I refrain from addressing topics like menstruation, wet dreams, intercourse, and childbirth in an 8th grade sex education class. There are limits beyond which truth will not bend.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Through it all, there was never any real reason to disclose my personal life to my students or my colleagues. What I did outside my classroom had no bearing on my teaching. I worked to teach with compassion, care and respect. I taught with integrity and with academic rigor. My goal was to find a way to help every student succeed. Whatever they brought to me, my job was to help them use all of their skills and talents to build their very best pathway forward.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And, then I retired. I left my life’s work behind, and I walked away one very early February morning, and I never looked back. There was no ceremony, and there were no goodbyes. It was sudden, and it was very, very final. I took a deep breath and stepped from one part of my life into the next. Now, three years later, I find my life is slower, quieter, deeper. I am also very glad to find that many of those former students remain connected to me through the miracle of social media. For all of its many very real flaws, it does provide some definite paths to those connections. I am so grateful.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Lately, though, I’ve been contemplating the fact that those young people still have little sense of who it is that they think they “know.” My Catholic School Teacher costume was just that...a disguise. It served to allow me to function in a world where I could work, earn a living, and make a valuable contribution in the lives of young people, but it required me to keep much of who I was hidden from view. The vast reality of who I really am would have made that teaching life untenable, but without the truth of it, these current friendships are flat and one dimensional. There are so many potentially interesting conversations that have no place from which to begin.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I have no reason to hide any longer, and really nothing of substance to lose. So, at the risk of alienating some, I want to step into the daylight and perhaps open the door to a deeper set of understandings with those who might choose that. Like everyone else, I am a person with many levels of complexity. There are many sides to “Ms. D.”</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I am politically liberal and unashamedly progressive. I simply believe that all people ought to be able to live in safety with health, comfort, and dignity. I am anti-racist, although I still have much to learn about how to fully live out that aspiration in the world. I have been a feminist since my teens. I believe that no one ought to be treated as less because of their sex, sexuality, or gender identity. I think every person ought to be able to earn a decent living wage doing work that has dignity in a workplace that is safe and protected from abuse. I believe everyone should be able to obtain a full range of healthcare services, and that paying for those services should not result in economic hardship. People should have adequate housing, food, and drinking water. Our air, water, and food supply should all be safe. Education should be accessible and affordable to every person from the preschool to the very highest level for every single person. Your zip code or your family’s last name should not determine your ability to access educational opportunities. We must prioritize the protection of our planet’s environment. Failure to do so dooms our future; dooms the future of every living thing on the planet. There might me more, but that is the gist of it. Honestly, I don’t feel like most of that is so very radical. It seems like what decent people ought to think about things.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I am a masochist. I eroticize pain. I participate in a sexual-erotic relationship as the masochistic bottom partner with a sadistic top. He likes to inflict pain, and so we are well matched. The dance that we engage in together works to our mutual gratification. I get regularly spanked, flogged, caned, paddled, strapped, and whipped. It is a sexual practice that is likely not for everyone, but it takes me places that I cannot get to in any other way. I reach heights of humming, roaring ecstasy that are beyond my reach without this particular kind of power play. I don’t prescribe it for others, and I never impose it on others. I am careful about consent. However, in a world that assumes that people all engage in a particular sort of “normal” sexual relating, to not acknowledge and honor my own sexual expression is a kind of amputation that I will not tolerate any longer.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I also live within a polyamorous family. There are three of us. Tom and Teresa are legally married to each other. I am divorced; no longer married, but firmly committed and connected to the two of them. We love one another. Ours is a family, no different in most ways than any other. We own a home together, we manage our finances together, we eat together, cook together, handle the household chores together, support one another in times of health crises, work around one another’s schedules… just do the things that families do. We are not looking for other partners, so we are more closed than some poly families, and we are all straight, so we “love” one another in the ways that work best between the different ones of us, but we DO love one another.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So, yeah. I am not exactly that Catholic school teacher lady with her cats that I projected for all those years. I am a bit more alternative than it might have appeared to those who sat in my classrooms back in the day. I have no idea how that might land, but I am ready to live out here in the world. I am completely comfortable with who I have come to be. There is no need to ask for anyone’s approval. I am always happy for the friendship of those who offer it, and glad to offer it in return to those who might find it of some value, but I will not hide any longer. Let it be what it truly is.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sue</span></p><div><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18440943.post-68900391741020694012021-03-14T19:11:00.004-04:002021-03-15T14:53:38.682-04:00Safe Words in Adult Consensual Spanking: Pain is not Harm<p> <span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">Let’s talk about what is entailed in an agreement between adults to participate in a spanking experience, with a particular focus on the (often misconstrued) concept of the “safeword”.</span></p><span id="docs-internal-guid-7266880f-7fff-14cb-f878-88388e15c46d"><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A spanking experience is an intentionally inflicted crisis in the form of slaps, blows, strikes of some sort administered to someon’s buttocks resulting in pain. We are most of us aware that in history spanking was administered by adults to children as disciplinary punishment. Less well known spanking was widely used as a means of punishing adults in servitude, penal environments etc. We have also seen an increasing awareness of adults who engage in consensual spanking experiences in the interest of sensual erotic or psychological gratification. It also goes without much in depth thought that a spanking transaction, whether as part of a lifelong relationship or a one time encounter, requires there must be a partner who administers spanking (i. e., the Top partner) and a partner who is spanked (i. e. the bottom partner). Inherent to painfully striking another or to being painfully struck by another is risk of harm or injury.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">All my thought about practicing adult consensual spanking is underpinned by the assumption that spanking partners, whether Top or bottom, are to have their risks of harm minimized while they are engaged in spanking. Both partners consent to partcipate in spanking relies on this assurance to protect each other’s safety.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So far we have found, and agreed that adult consensual spanking is the agreement of two adults that one adult will spank the other. That spanking will result in pain experienced by the bottom partner. There will be effort to assure that despite this intentionally inflicted and intentionally accepted painful experience both partners will, to the degree possible, be kept free from harm as a result of this spanking.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I realize I may seem to be going on and on about obvious points. Please hang in with me.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So the bottom partner is going to intentionally submit to pain in the form of spanking. When one experiences pain, the natural human response is to attempt to end or lessen that pain, or to object to that pain.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">People being spanked will frequently reach back to block blows, or attempt to move away from the ability of the Top to reach them, or object, demand a halt to the spanking, or beg the Top to stop spanking them to lessen or end the pain they are in. These behaviors are all reflective of the bottom partner’s growing degree of crisis experienced as the spanking progresses. It is important to recall that both parties to the spanking have agreed to intentionally create this crisis.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">An important protection in terms of spanking partners avoiding harm is the “safe word”. The safe word is a mutually agreed upon signal word, for example “giraffe” that both partners agree will, if it is uttered by the bottom during the spanking, halt the spanking, so the bottom’s unsafe situation can be remedied before the spanking resumes, if in fact it is even possible for the spanking to resume safely.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Pain, resulting from spanking, is not harm. If one is undergoing spanking and they can’t breathe, have chest pains, their legs or arms go numb, they lose vision, or hearing, or start to lose consciousness, it is totally imperative they must use their safe word signal. The spanking must halt and whatever is necessary to remedy the situation must be done……..even if emergency medical services must be called. If much more likely, the ongoing spanking results in steadily building pain, distress, this crisis is the exact crisis intentionally and consensually agreed to at its outset. It is not unsafe. The crisis through which one passes during an adult consensual spanking is the very stimulus that is the pathway to sacred sexuality.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I have been amazed at the proliferation of popular “Zen Spanking” websites on the net that purport to discuss spanking as a means to Tantric sex, almost all of whom encourage erstwhile spanking partners they don’t have to worry any spanking they get will hurt “too much”, because they will have a “safeword.” All they have to do if their spanking becomes uncomfortable, is call out “red!”……...the spanking will halt. They even explain that they, the bottom partners, are always in control of their spankings. Thus, the Top partner is simply pretty much non-interactant in the process. The pain and distress a bottom partner experiences during a spanking is not harm. It is precisely the experience both partners agreed to collaboratively create.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Thus defined, control that the bottom retains thwarts the very dynamic that Sacred Sexuality requires. It is in passing through the pain, the loss of control, the vulnerability, a spanking entails that releases one to sacred sexual union.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Safe words are vital to protect bottom partners from harm. They are not a means to enable bottom partners to prevent their surrendering control during spankings. Surrender of control, i. e., power exchange is a keystone of sacred sexuality.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Tom the Heretic</span></p><br /><br /></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18440943.post-44714164690246122192021-03-10T16:28:00.001-05:002021-03-10T16:32:02.713-05:00Relationships in the BDSM Universe<p> <span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">I have a lot more time to read these days. I retired from my 35-year teaching career three years ago, and so now I read whatever I choose. I wander from book to book; sometimes following a single author through their entire catalog, and then getting stuck in a particular genre, and then finding a topic that intrigues me, and so reading deeply in that realm for a time. Too, a couple of times a year, I end up with a stack of books that are intended for my grandson, because being the Gramma that sends books brings a certain set of responsibilities with it.</span></p><span id="docs-internal-guid-2e708dab-7fff-6afc-5dac-7345f4e49750"><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As Tom and I have become engaged in deeper conversations about the potential meanings behind our own BDSM practice, I found myself looking at some of what has been written about that lifestyle choice… and finding the offerings disappointing. The fiction seems all of a type, and the how-to’s seem pretty dry and lifeless. Where, I wonder, are the discussions of what this all means in terms of relationships? Why is it all so mechanistic; so oriented to win-lose; so lacking in human feeling and connection? Is it just me?</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Because here’s the thing…</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Life happens.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">No matter who spanks who; no matter how prettily you string each other up; no matter how many piercings; no matter how much candle wax you pour on your bottom partner; when all the slap and tickle is done, there is still plenty of good old day-to-day living to get through. When the regular, and not so regular living happens, it can be really important who is standing next to you. “Kneel before me, slave!” just won’t get you through everything. It won’t.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Outside of the dungeon, people die. They get seriously ill. Your kids turn out in ways you never, ever expected. Your job goes all to hell. Pandemics show up out of nowhere. Finances get stood on their head. Some idiot runs into your car. The IRS comes calling. There is shit to clean up, sometimes literally. Addiction happens. Oh, and you keep on getting older and older. Yeah. Life. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">That sexy, hot as hell Dominant, who swings a mean whip might be just the ticket when the world comes crashing down. Maybe. Or, maybe not. He or she might also turn to a quivering mess of “I don’t have a fucking clue what to do.” Some folks who look great in scene are as useless as teats on a boar hog in a crisis. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So, why is there so little conversation in our BDSM circles about how to build good, strong, stable relationships? Why do we talk about how to tie 15 different kinds of knots, but not how to discover whether a potential partner is of sterling character? How does a person, considering a D/S or M/S relationship make that decision with some confidence that their partner is stable, secure, reliable, trustworthy, and dependable? </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I want to know more than what your scene cred might be. I need to know if you will sit up all night at my bedside in the hospital. I want to be sure you will sit vigil with me when my loved one is dying. I have to be sure you will go with me to help bail my wayward teen out of jail… again. I want to know if you have issues with drugs or alcohol or gambling or sex. I need to know about your debt picture and your retirement plans and your ex-wives/husbands and any kids you have stashed in the wings. If I am hitching my wagon to yours, then I need to know what sort of train this is going to be. If that all seems terribly intrusive, and your response is that it is all off-putting, then you probably ought to meander on down the road, because I really don’t need to get spanked THAT bad (and I really do need to get spanked). But, if you aren’t a real partner for all of it, then you aren’t a partner, and I don’t need you. Move along.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sue</span></p><div><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18440943.post-39329338799481292492021-03-07T16:00:00.000-05:002021-03-07T16:00:18.444-05:00Consensual spanking: archetypal pathway to sacred sexuality<p> <span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">I am old. Yeah it’s true. I have repeated the daily rituals of life……...the proverbial practices needed to have life continue, called by Buddhist monks, “chop wood, carry water”, so often that now, I awaken to face the mirror, the same mirror I viewed my reflection in as a boy, to see an old man staring back at me. </span></p><span id="docs-internal-guid-2b7aed5a-7fff-bc0e-31b9-959f2990f1a8"><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">My life while at times a repetitive grind of everyday existence, has been anything but boring. There have been births of my children, spectacular loves with women who gifted me with their respect and caring, even at times when I could not find my own self-respect. Especially the love of my life-mates, sue and teresa. There have been heroic strivings through drugs, philosophies, religions, literature and psychology appreciation and study…...to find some way to answer existential questions like why, how, and even more poignantly perplexing at my stage of life, where am I headed? Throughout the tedium, the peaks of joy, love, sensual satiation, victories, things that just felt so good, there has been pain. There is an adage that if you love being part of the ecstasy of childbirth, don’t enter the birthing room, unless you can deal with agony and blood.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">My life, with its peaks amidst its mundanity, has been, at least as frequently, punctuated by pain. There have been medical crises during which I was in such agony that the maximum of the most potent opioids they dared give me, could not begin to give me relief. There has been defeat. There was the end of a love and family unit: divorce--which I barely survived. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">My greatest peaks, my joys, have been tangled and enmeshed, inseparably with pain. I am not alone in this.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">My earliest memories as a very small child featured sensual experienc that, for me, translated as a fascination with the experience of </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">SPANKING, </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">giving and receiving</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As I type that, I can imagine readers reacting at this point, “</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">WHAAAAAT</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">????” </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Where does that come from? </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“LOVE HURTS”</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Throughout time, throughout human experience, it has been clear that there is no love without pain. Adults must learn to entwine the ecstasy of love with its inextricable companion, pain. Over thousands of years human beings have made consensual spanking a means to not merely increase their erotic arousal and connection, but to deepen the depths of their love, and to mutually attain, share, and even give to others, the sacred.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Coming to terms with, then embracing, then delving into becoming proficient in the practice of adult consensual spanking over forty years, has been a central theme of my life.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Adult consensual spanking is a potent means to merge the sacred universe, within which medium we all float through our existance, and present reality. Consensual spanking is so well documented, and so universally practiced, that our culture’s collective unconscious responds to spanking as an archetype. Thus, it is thus a part of our inherent, inborn psychological and spiritual “infrastructure.” It is perhaps a metaphor for this pain/pleasure paradox inherent in human made tangible as part of our sexuality.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">By the way, when I refer to adult consensual spanking, I mean to include practices which have come to be called BDSM (i.e., bondage, discipline, and sadomasochism), DD or domestic discipline, Tantra, sacred sexuality, and there may be others I am not aware of. Over the decades I have identified within the BDSM and DD communities. I have witnessed endless attempts by some of those communities to state their community’s inherent superiority or “rightness” over the others. All of us are like the blind men and the elephant. Each is as “correct” as the perspective of our experience to date has afforded us.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I don’t support any community’s attempts for tribal superiority. I now choose to identify as a lifelong practitioner of consensual spanking. I know that soanking per se is not the sum total of BDSM practice. My own practice has incorporated knife play, bondage and restraint, flogging, caning, switching (both by striking with freshly cut tree branches or exchanging roles as Top, bottom, Dom, sub), disciplinary spanking, spanking therapy, mentoring novitate explorers and practitioners, recreational spanking (birthday spanking, initiation spanking, spanking sporting event wagers, competitve spanking), weight control disciplinary spanking, smoking cessation spanking, and I am sure others I’m forgetting. I’ve played with and in front of others many times, and had the opportunity to witness and learn from others. I’ve attended seminars on piss play, slapping, kicking, breath play, shibari bondage, suspension, creating “mind fucks”, and other things that so far I have no intention or aspiration to include in my life. However, central to the practices of each of these communities, is adult consensual spanking. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’ve been through three days of Foundation for Shamanic Studies education along with teresa and sue (purportedly, I am “certified” to perform shamanic soul retrieval). I have undergone my own soul retrieval with a Shaman I respect. I am graduate degreed as a counseling psychologist. These experiences lead me to feel some degree of awareness of sacredness and its role in our adult lives.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Through all of this, there is one central theme: Adult Consensual Spanking: a portal to the sacred, if practiced well enough, long enough, and with others you love. I am grateful it is part of my/our life. I believe it can add joy and ultimately sacredness to others, if they choose to embrace it to enrich their lives.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Tom the Heretic</span></p><br /><br /><br /></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18440943.post-13835754300616340202021-03-04T19:30:00.003-05:002021-03-04T19:30:50.222-05:00Thoughts From the Bottom<p> <span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">Perhaps it is time to pick back up here.</span></p><span id="docs-internal-guid-5ab0ce6e-7fff-a7b7-0b9e-6e496c9af2ea"><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Ten years have passed. We have aged. Life has settled, and we have grown some. Of course, we have changed, evolved, learned some things, both as individuals and together. We are not as we once were, but we are still “we.”</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Our conversation lately has turned to spiritual sexuality and how our own BDSM practice intersects with that world. Tom, being who he is, seems very intent on doing lots of research, seeking out the experts who have all sort of things to say on the subject. He finds all of that affirming, and it seems to really fire him up. So, good. I find that, for myself, my days of chasing spiritual “experts” are behind me. My tendency to spiritual backpacking leads me to look with jaundiced eyes on the teachings of gurus. I grew up Catholic, studied with a Lakota Sioux teacher, and spent many years with Quakers. These days, I find that what works best for me is to get my head to quiet down, and find my way to a quiet space inside myself. It is there that I find what I experience as the great mystery. That, for me, is one of the real magical part of our BDSM practice. It can, when we hit it just right, take me into that place. So…</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I am a masochist, and claim the part of submissive bottom partner. Partner is important to this whole narrative. Tom and I do this thing together. I have come, over all these years, to see it as an intricate sort of dance. We don’t do exactly the same dance, but we do dance together.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">He is doing a good bit of writing about his view of all of this. From my perspective, he is the dominant force. He is the one who inflicts pain. In session, I sometimes picture him as The Count from Sesame Street, because I can often hear him back there behind me counting under his breath.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">For my part, I do not count strokes. I do, generally, practice an eight-count. There are two reasons for that. The first is that it reminds me to breathe, and breathing is really important. So, in one-two, out three-four, in five-six, out seven-eight. The other reason for the eight-count is that it prevents me from counting strokes. I really, really don’t want to know. I don’t want to know how many there have been, and I for sure don’t want to know how many there might still be, or how many I think there should still be. That way lies fear, panic, and probably, at some point, rage.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What I have discovered, walking this path, over all these years, is that I need to go into a session without expectations; without a whole lot of mental chatter (yes, I can hear those of you who know me well); with as little fear as is possible; with a sense of openness and willingness. And then…</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It hurts! The beginning of nearly every single spanking hurts like the very devil. Nevermind what the spanking porn videos with all those picture perfect models with their makeup that never runs might suggest, I find that I fight and struggle, and frequently rage through the start of most spankings. It isn’t fun, or sexy, or hot. It doesn’t turn me on. It just fucking hurts, and I hate it, and I most often hate him! In a modern-era BDSM ethic that says that the bottom partner ought to maintain absolute control; that there ought to ALWAYS be an inviolate safeword in place that has the effect of stopping the action, I would never, ever get past the first few minutes of a spanking, because well, DUH!</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Now, before anybody loses their shit, I am never unsafe in a session. I am absolutely required to tell him if I am in some sense in danger. So, if I am experiencing chest pains, or shortness of breath, or unexplained loss of vision, I would be expected to make that clear to him. He would stop the session, and tend to my needs. If necessary, I would receive appropriate medical care. The point of our BDSM play is that he chooses to hurt me. He does not ever want me harmed. With that said, I do not have the capacity to stop our play because it hurts. The hurting is the point of the whole thing. For us both. Stopping the action because it hurts is utterly off limits for me. Further, if I were to do that, I would miss out on the possibility that exists beyond that beginning place where it just hurts. It is in the territory beyond that place of just hurting where the magic and the mystery lies. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Now, as always, my way is mine. It isn’t for everyone. I don’t presume to prescribe. I have, however, found that, if I can tough it out and hang on through that initial difficult place; if he does not stop when I am fussing and whining and raging, then I may, possibly break through to something else. I may, if it all works just right, reach the top of the first big hill on the world’s tallest roller coaster, and drop over the edge in a breath-taking rush. When it happens, I’ll swoop down along a deep violet tunnel, following some presence that I can sense, knowing that I am safely guided. The noise will quiet down and turn to colors; purples and blues. The pain will fade into the background and I will float along, following my guide. I can still respond to him if he speaks to me, but I no longer worry about the intensity of the sensations he is eliciting… that is his realm, not mine. Time slows down. Sometimes I see things, or learn things, or hear things. Sometimes I fly away. I always have the impression that the experience is something that he “allows.” Occasionally, I will hear myself roaring like an animal; my power unleashed. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I know he sees it all. He refers to it as my “getting off.” I understand that it sets him free; liberates his sadistic urges, and allows him to go to a higher level of play than he might otherwise, because he knows that my tolerance is much higher in that state.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When he calls me back, I tend to come to rather slowly, as if from some sort of trance. I tend to feel a bit stupid for a time. I imagine most of that is the effect of the endorphin rush. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So. Spiritual? Perhaps. I tend to not put too much stock in such descriptors, but make of it what you will.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sue</span></p><br /><br /></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18440943.post-80342551149304912392021-02-23T19:22:00.000-05:002021-02-23T19:22:50.051-05:00<p> <span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">Having said hello after a ten year posting hiatus, I will discuss why I might write here again,</span></p><span id="docs-internal-guid-616ce62d-7fff-ff0d-3436-3e2069d77222"><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Anyone who has spent even a modest effort to read about adults who choose, whatever their motivation, to agree to spank each other finds a wealth of Internet content dedicated to this topic. These discussions may be primarily prurient, or research-based. or fictional, or pictorial, or even humorous in their focus. Whether you are new to this topic, are quite experienced, are interested in learning about it as an academic interest, are struggling to understand the role a persistent nagging interest in spanking has in your sensual erotic orientation, or are just a poor hapless Internet pilgrim who has found your way here through serendipity or mishap, you may find reading here enlightening or a giant bore. If the latter is the case, run for your life, leave here, and seek a more compatible source of stimulation. If on the other hand, you are inquisitive, or perhaps you identify with such labels as Dominant, or submissive, switch, slave, or Head of Household, or sadist, or masochist, or taken in hand, or Top, bottom, spanker or spankee, spanking fetishist, therapist, spanking devotee, disciplinarian, or are simply sensually or erotically adventurous, you might find something here worth your time and interest.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I hope to explore and discuss the ways many adults incorporate adult consensual spanking into their lives. For many of us spanking becomes a primary source of connection, stimulation, excitement, drama, intimacy, and fun. Whether any, or all, of these motivations lead you to agree to partner with others around spanking, or this topic is simply an interest, you might find reading here interesting.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I am a man, well into the seventh decade of life. I have graduate level education as a counseling psychologist. Much more usefully, I have about forty years life experience studying, practicing, and learning about the arena many refer to as BDSM, or my more specific orientation: adult consensual erotic and or disciplinary spanking. Since my very earliest conscious awareness I have had an obsessive desire to participate in spanking. Early on I was embarrassed I felt this way. I realized not everyone had this need. Growing up in the mid-1950's U.S., spanking was everywhere: in homes, in school, in church, in magazines, in literature, on the then cool new medium- television, on radio, and in newspapers. Heck if you were misbehaving kid, playing in the neighborhood, it was not at all uncommon that a neighboring parent of another kid might just decide to spank you. So it was not strange to be aware of it. In fact one would have needed to be deaf and blind to not be continually bombarded with spanking stimuli. In my family spanking was a sacred and almost a pious practice as necessary and important as attending school, or church, or eating everything on your plate to growing successfully to adulthood. There were times I was spanked simply because I had not been spanked in a while. Like bathing, it was not good for children to go too long without a spanking. My experience was not unique from my peers. At times friends of mine and I would agree to spank each other as a childish role play (perhaps even mildly erotic play) but those events were few and insignificant. As I progressed into adolescence, sexual awakening, specifically interest in spanking girls, women absorbed a great deal of my attention. When I masturbated I was dreaming of administering spankings. I found friends who shared my interest. There was a guy who lived across the street from me with whom I exchanged the rare story or pic from a men's pulp magazine, or a Playboy fold-out focused on a woman's ass that just riveted us. But as I aged I became worried. I could not imagine a relationship with a woman without spanking her, yet how could I, an educated, ethical, empathic, caring person who was interested in caring for people and facilitating their development, a social activist, a feminist, have as my primary erotic urge: spanking.....the infliction of pain and submission on those for whom I cared. What was WRONG WITH ME?????</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’ve spent about forty-five years learning first that while my orientation is not mainstream or average, I am not alone, and I am not mentally ill for having it. I have worked to improve technique, grow relationship skills, and refine values and philosophy in my adult consensual spanking practice. I’ve grown in depth relationships that are the love of a lifetime, to much more casual experiences with friends who wanted to explore, experience, or be mentored. I’ve known partners who wanted to have spanking therapeutic or disciplinary mentoring.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I have learned practice that is good for me. I continue to learn and evolve. I am not “the” expert. There are some who have less knowledge content than I. What I have, is what seems right for me……..today. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I love writing about ,discussing ,and learning about this subject. I like meeting those who share this interest. I want a place to express my experience.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I hope to do so here. If I write things no one else chooses to read, so be it. If you find something here of value or interest that will be icing on my cake.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Tom the Heretic</span></p><div><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18440943.post-27601355331765902232021-02-23T19:16:00.001-05:002021-02-23T19:16:25.572-05:00Future Posting Agenda<p> <span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">It seems I am afflicted by a typical writer’s quandary. When I am busily engaged in other activities than blog posting, I think of something to write about. If I go to actually write, I can’t think of what I might write about. This is I hope a helpful list of potential future topics.</span></p><span id="docs-internal-guid-33b343c1-7fff-1fbe-0c21-7e190d04cd01"><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">My gratitude for my/our family’s life status.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The evolution in my style and spanking, restraint, etc.,, implement selection at this point 40 years into my BDSM practice.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Relationship to BDSM community groups.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Psychology of spanking play.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Birthday spankings.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">BDSM and other alternative sensual erotic orientations are not aberrant, and explainable as the result of some sort of pathological “brokenness”.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Safe words and other philosophical aspects of adult consensual spanking.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">My “heretic” status, including why I don’t do florentine flogging.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I suspect this is not so much a menu of “topic teases for potential future readership. I’m not that expectant that the broad readership that was here ten or more years ago still exists, due to lack of content here and general changes blogosphere reader behavior. It will be useful to me, however, when I face the blank page and think,” Now what was that thought I had, I thought I might write about?”</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Tom the Heretic</span></p><div><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18440943.post-37434620197776040002021-02-17T16:57:00.010-05:002021-02-18T18:53:18.407-05:00<p><b> Hello Again</b></p><p>I haven't written here since about ten years ago. After so long a hiatus I want there to be a bridge between where things were at the time I disappeared, and now, for those few rare individuals who read here then, and who may encounter this now. I think perhaps a WTF? reaction could occur. I hope this helps that. If you are new to reading us ,then perhaps this might begin a portion of a bio to provide some context to what you read from me.</p><span id="docs-internal-guid-f8e6d6ed-7fff-f018-9ff9-4573266a8f43"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A period of crisis that evolved over 2010 and into 2011, culminated in my family’s summoning the police the third time in January 2011, not without cause. I began my longest stretch of how we in the U S treat addiction. Jail. It’s where one is schooled that they are sub-human scum. I did learn. Just a few weeks ago I commemorated the completion of ten years of sobriety. Tomorrow it will be ten years and one month. I’m determined never to drink again, and that being the case I hope I may see twenty or thirty years sobriety. I’m seventy-one.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I certainly have benefited my health, and our finances in the last ten years, not drinking. I am not at all sure I can imagine what intoxication would be like today, nor do I want to experience it. I do have endless longings, cravings for various liquors I adored, and good red wine. I still feel weak, ashamed, and humiliated I was not able to “handle” drinking without wrecking my life over it, and the horrors I subjected my loves Teresa and Sue to. I feel like wetting myself when I see a cop and have dreams of killing police…….some of them waking. I appreciate new irony each time I listen to voicemail solicitations from the fraternal Order of Police trying to get a contribution from me.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The courts forced me to actively participate in AA, twice every week, monitored by court spies who keep track of probationer attendance, for two years. As soon as my probation ended I attended my last AA meeting. People seem surprised I don’t continue in AA. I am bolstered in</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">my resolve to not drink by the fear that were I to drink again, I might have to go back to AA meetings.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I also did “treatment”, twelve-step based treatment, for those of you who are interested. It was a huge waste but did involve S and T actively in my “recovery” process and gave them hugely important strokes, affirmation for all my disease had caused them to suffer, for the terribly hard steps they took to save me.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Oh yeah, I practice the two step plan. It’s my own: not developed by some addiction rehab. Guru. The first is that I drink no alcohol. The second is I swallow no alcohol. The redundancy is intentional……..a fail safe. I do this each day. Each morning I renew that as the prime directive for that day. I have found that if I do that over time, it has remarkable impact on alcohol addiction. It also means I still lead my life in reaction to alcohol. Leading life in reaction to alcohol, or other substances is my definition of addiction. Recovery is not succumbing to use.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The three of us are still together in our unique and loving intentional family. I never returned to work. My criminal record placed my continued professional career out of reach. Magically all this happened at an age that retirement and pension etc., benefits were and have been possible for me. S, six years younger than I, is now two years retired. T, eight years younger than I, blessedly has excellent professional employment, here at home with us. She is wildly successful. We frequently conjecture about how much longer her career will extend.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">About two and a half years ago now we three sold our two side by side condo’s and purchased a very nice suburban home together, which we have substantially renovated and renewed. Today we are very happy together there. S and my retirements means that "discovery” of our polyamorous intentional family-life no longer threatens our professional careers. T’s employer has no concern for her lifestyle dynamics so long as she performs her work. Heck we have joked that her employer will permit a gay partner’s being added to an employee’s health and life insurance benefits. Perhaps they would permit her to add s to her policy along with me, her husband. Now T and S are not queer, but do love each other and me and we have all been together 19 years. While her corporation is progressive, perhaps even “WOKE”, embracing polyamory is well beyond the pale, of their h r policies, even in 2021.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What about my life, in general, in the interim since I last wrote here? I have done some study, heavily laden with looking at the work of Carl Jung, and his hugely helpful writings for elders, and my continual quandary and internal conflict to resolve my feelings and confusion about religion/spirituality, and the metaphorically similar conflict between Bible history/theology.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I have been in therapy since early 2011.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I continue my life long sensual erotic orientation to kink in the form of spanking.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I obsessively collect professional quality spanking implements and practice using them as often as life affords me the opportunity with consenting adults and certainly my loves. No doubt I will buy more.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I am obsessed too with knives. I have hundreds of collector quality knives. I don’t want to imagine the cost their acquisition has entailed. I do incorporate them as sensual implements in kink play.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I am currently lusting after a watch on-line. I have about fifty watches. I don’t need it. I spend way too much energy wanting it. So goes my life.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Hey I’m sober:)</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I have things I’d like to write but it didn’t seem right to simply begin back here where I used to write, without some greeting, especially considering my state when I left.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">To those of you who, when I was last here in the throws of my crisis, and quite frankly in suicidal agony, who chose to show me your friendship (and even gratitude for opening our home to one of you real time, when you were in crisis) by telling us that I was and, I guess, therefore am, a worthless drunk, FUCK YOU!! I hope to never encounter you again. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">By the way, that approach to someone in crisis is never helpful, unless perhaps it enables you to feel superior to another.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">To many others, who I never thanked when I left here ten years ago, who showed support to S and T and to me, despite my miserable condition then, THANK YOU! </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I am sure you have thought that I did not read and hear you in that I just dropped from view. I did read …….each of you. Times lying in my jail cell, or in the psychiatric hospital, or when struggling to feel that I had some level of human worth remaining, I reviewed your words in my mind. You can’t know how truly life-saving your kindness was.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Thanks,</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Tom</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">PS I am still a spanking obsessed Dominant with about 40 years experience with SM and related art forms. I still love my two loves and we plan to live the rest of our lives together, here. I have succeeded in maintaining the massive weight loss achieved through my gastric bypass surgery March 23, 2009, and recounted here in our linked sister blog Herons Transforming.</span></p><br /><br /></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18440943.post-36516223108546420712015-08-22T12:05:00.002-04:002015-08-22T12:05:25.787-04:00Sue's "New" BlogI think that when I decided to move on to a new blog home, I did not talk at all about WHERE that would be. I was feeling stalked here, and wanted to be more circumspect. Now I do think that I am feeling safer again, so IF there is anyone who wants to read a much different sort of blog, you can find me here: <a href="http://devotedlydreamingme.blogspot.com/">http://devotedlydreamingme.blogspot.com/</a><br />
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SueUnknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18440943.post-5778106735419732332015-06-10T12:52:00.000-04:002015-06-10T12:52:00.747-04:00AttackedThere have been threats to our privacy and security, coming from some nameless, faceless critter. We have phone numbers, and some likely identifiers. If need be, we can take legal action. For the time being, however, we have removed most of the most "incriminating" photos from this site. You will find blank, space holders where you used to find the most graphic of our spanking photos. That feels like a big loss to me, but it must be ... The price of being at the fringe in a society where some feel they are just more and better than others.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18440943.post-30641195125857956542015-04-26T18:41:00.003-04:002015-04-26T18:41:56.809-04:00Tom Has a New BlogA new blog is beginning here: <a href="http://beginningisonlyatinybitdifferent.blogspot.com/">http://beginningisonlyatinybitdifferent.blogspot.com/</a>.<div>
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If you are interested, please feel free to read and comment.</div>
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Tom</div>
Raheretichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08816564994600644439noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18440943.post-43099325369641407112014-10-05T18:52:00.000-04:002014-10-05T18:52:03.657-04:00Time for Something NewIt seems clear to me, finally, that this blog has run its course. The life this place started out to describe has changed irretrievably.<br />
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I want to write what I want to write, and this isn't it. I'm starting afresh somewhere else. <br />
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If you are interested, write to me, and I'll clue you in.<br />
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Thanks for all the good times.<br />
SueUnknownnoreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18440943.post-57947890929548171462014-09-14T13:57:00.002-04:002014-09-14T13:57:34.641-04:00DustWe had friends for dinner last night... Friends who are curious about BDSM and our collection of toys. So, after dinner, we opened up the flogging frame, and began dragging out the toys: floggers, and paddles, and quirt, and canes.<br />
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Almost everything was covered in dust, lots and lots of dust.<br />
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One friend commented to me that he thought I should have "cleaned the toys after we played with them the last time."<br />
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"I did." I told him.<br />
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<a href="https://encrypted-tbn3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSMgUFyCc1lQuZZuiuzlwcVnvJh9eicynK7XVS6TufI-2pSyaBdyQJKgeRN" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://encrypted-tbn3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSMgUFyCc1lQuZZuiuzlwcVnvJh9eicynK7XVS6TufI-2pSyaBdyQJKgeRN" style="height: 172px; margin-top: 0px; width: 264px;" /></a></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18440943.post-73488408487664759712014-08-31T18:21:00.000-04:002014-08-31T18:21:31.491-04:00Interesting?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41f5TyyI33L._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41f5TyyI33L._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg" height="320" width="204" /></a></div>
I've been reading <u>The Mind Body Problem</u>, by Rebecca Goldstein. The novel centers around the relationship between two characters, Renee and her husband, mathematical genius, Noam Himmel. Theirs is, from the outset, a terrible mismatch -- simultaneously painful and intriguing. <br />
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At one point, the book delves into the question (from a philosophical and mathematical standpoint) of whether sex is interesting. So, I've found myself pondering... Is it? <br />
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There's the, more or less, ubiquitous set of sensations. For all the variation among us; size, shape, color, temperament, appetite, belief... the range of human sexual experience is pretty similar. Those of us in the BDSM community tend, I suspect, to think we've concocted a wider and wilder range of sexual experience, but even with our kinky repertoire added to the mix, the sexual sensation catalog only has so many pages. <br />
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Once we have, ourselves, crossed the line that delineates sexual imagining and sexual fantasy from sexual experience, the extent of the territory to be explored is bounded. From missionary position, one on one, penis in vagina copulation, through the realms of tantric pleasures, and on into the varieties of power exchange and sadomasochistic play, there are only so many sensations that can be wrung from the human frame. We may pick from the menu of options. We may combine the elements in a dizzying array of possibilities. We may achieve orgasms, in singles and multiples, and in whatever order, individually or as couples. We can wash, rinse, and repeat until we wear ourselves completely out. And then what? Once we've poked and prodded and stroked and wrestled one another into sexual delirium a few hundred or a few thousand times. Once we know all the angles, and every nuance, and every single moan and sigh ... is sex interesting?<br />
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What say you?Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18440943.post-71236058421604601172014-08-26T21:22:00.003-04:002014-08-26T21:22:51.193-04:00First DayWe are off!<br />
Today was the first full day of school.<br />
119 students between the ages of 11 and 14.<br />
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Temperatures were in the low 90's today, and the humidity was in the 85% range. <br />
Wicked hot.<br />
Outside.<br />
Inside our nearly 100 year old building, with NO air conditioning, it was sweltering. <br />
Death by sweat.<br />
The forecast is for the heat to continue this week.<br />
And next.<br />
And then we should see a bit of a cool down. <br />
I hope.<br />
Until then, we just try and stay hydrated.<br />
Suck it up, and forge forward.<br />
Hot, hot, hot, hot!Unknownnoreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18440943.post-40776102554185961102014-08-24T17:37:00.001-04:002014-08-24T17:37:35.247-04:00School Starts Tomorrow marks the beginning of this 2014-2015 school year. I think that I am ready to go...<br />
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I have new school clothes and new school shoes. The room is all clean and neat and organized (the ONLY time this year that it will be any of those things). I have lesson plans and science labs all set and ready to go.<br />
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All that remains is to add kids. They bring the whole business to life, create the questions, find the solutions, seek out the new ideas and share what they find. In some ways, the work I do is about setting all of that in motion, and then trying to stay out of their way. What I give them is the space and time to work and figure out what is out there waiting for them to find it. I provide the assurance that they CAN do that, I encourage their efforts and cheer their attempts. I help them mop up after failures, and I sit with them as they plan new ways of tackling problems that challenge them. It is a mad, messy, chaotic, up and down endeavor, and I love it all.<br />
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I am in the remaining hours before we all come together to start a new year. It is, for me, always a time of nervous, anxious, worried "what if-ing." As long as I have done this work, I never seem to approach a new year without worrying about the beginning. So, now I just need the kids to arrive. I need us to start. I need us to meet and smile and shake hands and turn together to walk into the new year together. <br />
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I just hate the waiting!Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18440943.post-36053056914807626382014-08-17T21:43:00.001-04:002014-08-17T21:43:26.613-04:00A Slow, Sleepy SummerWe've slept through a good bit of this summer. We have. <br />
Chalk it up to the reality that we are each growing older. I saw my 59th birthday last February, and he turned 65 in April. Neither of us are ancient, but we're not youngsters either. Clearly. <br />
I came into this summer break with more than the usual level of exhaustion. A difficult ending to the last school year left me sad, worn, feeling drained. I finished without my usual sense of elation at the ending. And, it has taken me all of the long days and nights to get myself back into some kind of feeling of vitality and personal well-being. We have simply slept and slept and slept, rising around 11:00 most mornings. <br />
I've struggled mightily with migraine headaches this summer, seldom going more than a day or two without a monster headache. Severity has been more of an issue as well. Frequency and intensity and duration all part of a personal battle that has left me too often gasping on the shores of a sea of headache pain.<br />
Tom has had a really tough month following the cardiac ablation in July. The procedure itself was more difficult than we expected, and then there were complications to COMPLICATE things. He has spent a month feeling pretty miserable -- worn out and in pain. And so, when we have been able to get him to rest comfortably, we have... slept. <br />
Maybe, at some level, we have needed all these long, slow, sleepy days to finally complete that transit through all the various challenges of the last number of years. There has been no real drama. No days of anger and bitterness. We've simply curled up together and drifted along on a time of peace and calm.<br />
Now, the days of summer are ending, officially. According to the calendar. Time for me to head back to the classroom. In some ways, I feel like we squandered the opportunity to play and spank and wind ourselves <br />
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back into some sort of hot and passionate and kinky spin. But then, I suspect that we will be better having taken these quiet, soft, warm days together. Perhaps, this summer will become for us, the invincible summer that will carry us forward into and through the coming winter. And so, in this last weekend before the whirl begins, I am glad for this long, lazy, sleepy summer shared with my dear love.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18440943.post-82542652046898344322014-08-12T22:52:00.001-04:002014-08-12T22:52:54.582-04:0041!I am one week away from the beginning of the week of meetings ahead of the start of the school year. What a summer it has been.<br />
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Today, I did manage to finally go "over the top" with my summer "bag challenge." I cleaned out the drawer in my kitchen where those plastic containers tend to accumulate. Lots of them were without lids, and a lot of them were just tired and worn out. I am down to just those that are decent and actually usable now. The others were relegated to the neighborhood recycling bin.<br />
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The other bag today, was filled with old pants and jeans that I just don't like or wear anymore. So those will be hauled off to the second-hand store later this week.<br />
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I am not done. There are more nooks and crannies for me to weed through, but I am pleased to have done what I set out to do at the beginning of the summer. <br />
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We are still living with way more stuff than we really need around here, but it is less cluttered than it was when I started. I'll take it.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18440943.post-78149607948986676672014-08-10T14:09:00.002-04:002014-08-10T14:09:52.636-04:00Being HappyMany, many, many years ago, I had a friend who was fanatically seeking after spiritual growth. I met her while I was studying with a Lakota Sioux teacher. She was "ahead" of me on the path, and I came to believe that it was very important to her to STAY ahead of me. We shared many of the same dreams and the same general orientation to the spiritual world. As she worked and toiled to discern her spiritual paht, she never did understand my tendency to meander along that same path, picking up pretty stones and lingering on fallen logs next to singing brooks. <br />
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We maintained a push-pull friendship for many years, and then there came a day when I decided that I was no longer interested in "seeking" the way. I had come to understand that I was "on the path;" that everything I did and every choice I made was part of it all. I didn't have to go find the "spirit," I realized. I was "spirit," and everything about my life was a manifestation of that reality. So, I quit chasing the esoteric wisps of expanded consciousness. The day to day, mundane world in which I lived was, I believed, enough. There was no need to search further. <br />
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My friend was angry. Furious, in fact. "What are you doing?" she demanded. :What do you think you are going to do, now?" <br />
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"I am going to be happy," I told her. She sputtered in exasperation, turned her back, and walked away. We never spoke again. She would not answer the phone, or return my calls. Letters went unanswered. Our once parallel paths never ran in tandem again.<br />
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I embarked on a solitary path that day, and that is the first thing that I have learned about being happy. No one in responsible for making me happy. The random events of my days are not the causes of my happiness. I choose to be happy, or not. It is something that each of us does all by ourselves. No one can do it for us.<br />
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I think, from the perspective of almost six decades, that most people would say that they want to be happy, but that few ever figure out that they can BE happy. With fifteen some years in the BDSM lifestyle, I have chased after happiness myself, and I've had plenty of company while I did it. I can look back over the years, many of them documented in this blog, and see all that frantic, obsessive, compulsive flailing after the "elusive" happiness I sought. It has been, in some significant degree, the emotional equivalent of a snipe hunt (as described by Wikipedia):<br />
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<i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; text-align: center;">“A snipe hunt, a made up hunt that is also known as a fool’s errand, is a type of practical joke that involves experienced people making fun of credulous newcomers by giving them an impossible or imaginary task. The origin of the term is a practical joke where inexperienced campers are told about a bird or animal called the snipe as well as a usually preposterous method of catching it, such as running around the woods carrying a bag or making strange noises such as banging rocks together.”</span> </i><br />
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I think that one of the important lessons I've learned in these last few years is that I can choose to be happy. I am not at the mercy of people or events. My happiness is not a function of anything that those around me do or do not do, nor is it irretrievably linked to what is going on in the external environment. Things do not have to be perfect for me to be happy. It really is a simple choice -- If you want to be happy, then be that.<br />
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The thing that really does seem to impact our sense of happiness, according to a new study just published by neuroscientists at the College of London is our level of expectation. Disappointment is the poison pill for happiness, as it turns out. If my expectations are higher than the likely "payoff" in any given situation, then I will become disappointed (I got less than I hoped for), and my happiness evaporates. The real trick to being happy most of the time is to manage expectations, while allowing myself to notice what is good about the present moment. <br />
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So, for example, if I work myself into some big, romantic, the orchestra swells and the fireworks light up the sky, imagined encounter sort of relational expectation ... and what I get is the much more typical, weekend morning hard-on that needs to be attended to, so would you please... deal, I am likely to feel a huge letdown, and then it is pretty easy to get tipped over into feeling unhappy. Rawr, rawr, rawr, rawr...<br />
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If on the other hand, I go through my days, happy for the companionship, glad for the supports I do get, aware of the life that I get to live right here and right now, my expectations stay in line with the likely outcomes, and it is a lot easier to be happy. <br />
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That is, I suspect, the function that the once popular "gratitude journal" used to serve. Although I never got into that practice that swept the cyber universe a few years back, I can see the value of that discipline. If we look at our lives with the intent to see those things that are good and for which we ought to be grateful, then we do not look outward and compare what we have to others, and begin wishing and longing for some "better" reality. Looking at my good, comfortable home, the meals that get put on my table, the closet full of comfortable clothes, the satisfying work, the loving family that surrounds me, I am better at living for me in this moment.<br />
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So... Yeah. It is probably just that easy. Stay in the moment. Enjoy and appreciate what is. Don't compare my life to anyone else's life. Don't try to make someone else responsible for my happiness. Tah Dah!Unknownnoreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18440943.post-58978525225417805602014-08-05T18:40:00.003-04:002014-08-05T18:40:53.325-04:00Why Marriage Matters Ohio<img class="logo" src="http://www.whymarriagemattersoh.org/images/logo.png" /><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Tomorrow, August 6, <span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 15px; line-height: 25.5px;">the 6th Circuit Court of Appeal will hear five marriage cases from four states, including two from Ohio.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #444444; font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 25.5px;">Tonight, hundreds of supporters of marriage equality gathered for a public rally ahead of tomorrows court arguments. </span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #444444; font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 25.5px;">The public support effort is being largely spearheaded by Why Marriage Matters Ohio (<a href="http://www.whymarriagemattersoh.org/">http://www.whymarriagemattersoh.org/</a> ). If you care. If it matters to you... Go now, and sign the pledge. Support the effort. If we all stand together, someday soon, marriage will be a right for all families in this country.</span></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18440943.post-59376168265789674982014-08-05T13:09:00.000-04:002014-08-05T15:45:59.825-04:00What Is a Community?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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" 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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit;">When I first started writing blog posts, some ten years ago, I was mostly hoping to find others to talk to; people who were "like me," that might understand what I was trying to learn and do and be. In time, I came to feel like the people that I "met" through the comments written here, and the comments I was able to leave other places, were a community of like-minded others, and sometimes, even friends. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit;">Communities are, by nature, distinctive. One community is not like another. Communities know what they are about. The members recognize each other, and community members know who is not part. <span style="line-height: 22px;">A social community, like this one in which we all participate, is one in which people are invited to come together online to learn, educate, mentor and discover more about themselves, and one another. As most of us have learned over the years, our community works best when our interactions are easy, when we communicate in ways that make sense, when each of us feel secure and welcomed.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 22px;">I've learned to value that community, and I have come to the point where I am unwilling to continue to struggle with the question of what to do about those who sometimes come here, uninvited, and impinge on what we have here. From my perspective, members of MY community, have shared my journey; they know my story; they've walked this road with me, and they have been steadfast companions. Companions, community members, don't snipe. They don't make off the cuff judgments. They don't take sides. They don't insist on some sort of retribution for perceived wrongs that have nothing to do with them. Companions, friends, listen carefully. They sit with one another. They stay for the good times and the bad times, and there is never any doubt that a friend will be there no matter what.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 22px;">That's the criteria for me. From now on. This blog is a place that belongs to me; a place that I share with those of you who choose to be part of my little community. You know who you are.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 22px;">Anyone else, those who are uninvited, are not welcome. I will know you by your actions, by your words. If there is any hint in what you come here to say, that you are "not a friend," I will remove all traces of your presence. I will guard and protect this place. I will preserve this small corner of the cyber world for myself, and those who choose to be here with me.</span></span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18440943.post-21187982770655275962014-08-03T23:48:00.000-04:002014-08-04T11:15:10.794-04:00Being HonestIt is a widely held tenet of the BDSM lifestyle that honesty and transparency are important. Even foundational. Necessary for this thing we do to work.<br />
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I've often heard it said that this person or that will absolutely not tolerate dishonesty. Mistakes in judgement -- yes. Carelessness -- OK. Plain, downright stupidity -- sure... even that. But not ever, never, no way will we tolerate dishonesty.<br />
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It makes sense. I guess. But I wonder what we really mean when we say we demand honesty and transparency. No. I wonder what I mean by that. Me.<br />
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Because here's the thing. I have been kinky since I was old enough to masturbate, and that was just not that old. Actually, I've been kinky since way before I was old enough to realize that being the way I am was not OK with the rest of the world. I learned to pretend that I wasn't like this at a very young age. By the time I reached the age of majority, I was a practiced liar. Mostly, at that point, I lied to myself. I was pretty naive, but I knew that if I were to live the "happily ever after" dream that was the background to every girlish imagining, I was going to have to play the part of a good girl / nice woman. No dark fetish tinged longings were allowed in the planned for future of marriage and family and successful career. So lying became the garment that I wore closest to my skin.<br />
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And the guy I married; he lied too. First he lied when he promised to take care of me and my children. That wasn't something he was prepared to do; able to do. He tried to maintain the illusion, but it just wasn't in his makeup. He was who he was -- good hearted, sweet, loving. He was no bread winner. Nor was he strong and protective by his nature. He might have convinced the 19 year old I was then that he was my knight in shining armor, but he knew it wasn't true. It was just that the lie was required if he was to have the life he wanted.<br />
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Somewhere along the line, I began to itch under the weight of the lie I was living. I began to "come out" as the freakish, fetish driven, weirdo I really was. Telling even some of that truth turned out to be no panacea. Honesty is not always the best policy. Standing in front of the man I'd married and telling him the truth about what I was and what I wanted created a whole new level of intimate dishonesty. What, after all, was he to do with that information? He wasn't any part of that dark world. He neither understood it nor wanted it. He only wanted his "comfortable, normal, socially acceptable" life to go on as it had been. So, he lied again. To meet my need, my demand, he tried to take on the guise of the dominant partner in my little personal movie. His dishonesty was understandable, I guess. My insistence on that dishonesty was unforgivable. <br />
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But the sad tale doesn't end there. Needs denied are wicked things. They whisper in the darkness. The hunger is never sated, and the longings never stop. It is a kind of madness swirling out of control. Anyone who has ever passed through the attempt to shove a fetish into some kind of back corner, or box, or closet, knows the futility; knows how the squashed down, buried, hidden desires come roaring out, demanding their day in the sun.<br />
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I found my way to get that dark drive fulfilled. I don't think it was conscious or planned. I only knew that when the opportunity came to get spanked, flogged, and caned by Tom, I was not about to walk the other way. Married? Yeah. I was. He was. I was willing to toss those vows in the can; willing to move away from my children; willing to quit a good job; willing to sell the family home. There was nothing I wasn't willing to do or give up in order to get what I wanted. That simple. I wanted, and that was all I knew. Turned out that my commitment to being wife or mother was only sort of that. Commitment? 'Til death do us part? In sickness or in health? For as long as you both shall live? Once upon a time, long long ago, I said yes to all of that. I lied. So.<br />
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Probably, in the rush and excitement, I lied to myself. I told myself that I could give up everything, give up my self, be nothing at all. I think I tried to believe the fiction that I could lose myself and be fulfilled in that loss. I'm sure that I wasn't honest with Tom. I let him believe that I was that "perfectly" submissive who needed only him, and really, only as much of him as he was willing to give. I let him believe that I could just join the stable of butts and it would all be fine with me. "Whatever you want, whenever you want." That is what I told him; what I told myself. <br />
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As it turned out, there was no way to talk myself into that story either. I did try. But we are who we are. No matter the stories we tell ourselves. <br />
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I don't know the lies others tell. Maybe, some never do. Tell lies. Maybe some are as open and honest and transparent as I've read for all these years. Maybe there are those who do not carry around dark secrets and shameful hidden failings. That must be so, because, to demand that level of truthfulness from another person, you would have to live up to that standard yourself. Wouldn't you? Wouldn't I? Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18440943.post-57517396236055510242014-08-02T20:34:00.001-04:002014-08-02T20:34:16.664-04:00Two More BagsI am not a shopper. I've never been a clothes horse. I like my comfortable things, and I tend to be pretty clueless about current fashion trends. When I find something that I like, that fits, that feels comfortable and easy to wear, I tend to keep it darn near forever.<br />
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Really.<br />
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I had a pair of brown, flat, ankle-high boots when he and I first met. I loved them. They were soft and comfortable... and well worn. I think I'd had them for probably 10 years at that point. That was 12 years ago. Every time I put them on, he fussed because, they were pretty pathetic I guess. But they were my brown boots, and I held on to them fiercely. Finally, about 3 years ago, he bought me a pair of brown Frye boots. They are very nice boots, and while they are not flat, the heels are reasonable. I like them, and I did, eventually, let my old brown boots go. But I am just like that. <br />
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My closet is just full of old, faded, well-worn, and much loved stuff. But tonight, I resumed my bag challenge from earlier in the summer. I waded into the closet, and peeled out all the old, too tight, too short-wasted, too faded, too frayed tops and sweaters. Not pants or dresses or jackets. Those will have to wait for another time. Just tops tonight. When I was done, I had two more bags of tops to be thrown out or sent on to the second-hand store. <br />
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I'm not done with closet thinning, but this was a good start. That brings the bag challenge total to 39. I'm thinking I will make that 40 bag mark and then some by the time I head back to school on the 19th.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18440943.post-21438695172550536152014-08-01T20:27:00.000-04:002014-08-01T20:27:22.128-04:00Miles and Miles of Hospital HallwaysOn July 24, Tom had a cardiac ablation to correct a heart arrhythmia and a steadily falling ejection fraction. The ablation was intended to burn out nodes in his heart that were generating errant electrical impulses, and so, causing the heart to dance to all sorts of odd rhythms. The procedure took 4-1/2 hours. When the catheters (3 of them) were removed from his artery and veins, the expectation was that it would take 25 minutes of a nurse applying pressure on the wounds to stop the bleeding. Instead, it took more than an hour. However, things did finally calm down, and after a 13-hour day, T and I were able to bring him home. He had orders to take it easy for a few days, and limitations on any heavy lifting, but otherwise the only thing we really needed to do was let him rest and regain his strength. <br />
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By Wednesday, he was feeling pretty good. He had a talk that he was scheduled to give that evening, and so, at about 1:00 PM, he was sitting at the dining table and going over his material for the presentation. He coughed. Once. No big deal. Just a cough. He felt something go "pop" in his groin, in the vicinity of the incisions from the ablation. Immediately, he complained of a sharp pain at that site. He sat there for a few minutes, believing it would probably just go away. But, of course, because we never do these medical things without complications, it didn't. Go away. After a few minutes, I helped him into the bedroom, got his jeans pulled off, and took a look. There was a scary looking bulge there in his groin. It was about an inch and a half long, and about a half of an inch wide. No blood, but scary just the same. We called the cardiologist's office, and were told to go straight to the emergency room.<br />
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I grabbed a bag, tossed in a few things, poured him a fresh coffee, and we took off. Because everything always happens in a fashion to create maximum challenge, T was tied up on a jury all week. <br />
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We made the drive to the hospital in about 15 minutes, and walked into the emergency room, where people were lined up, practically out the door. It was chaos. We got him into a wheelchair, got him checked in, and began the long, long, long wait. Emergency rooms are never comfortable places to wait. Never. We arrived at about 1 PM. It was about 4:00 when they diagnosed a pseudoaneurysm with an AV fistula. We called and cancelled his talk, and prepared to get him admitted. It was 9:30 when they finally came to get him to move him to a room, which was, mercifully private. <br />
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Actually, as hospital rooms go, this one was pretty nice with even a small sofa that converted into a sort of a bed. And so we settled in to wait for the next day and the tests that would determine if he needed an angiogram, or perhaps a thrombin injection to coagulate the aneurysm, or (worst case) surgery to repair it. It was a long, worried, sleepless night. We were up early the next morning. Might as well, neither of us were sleeping much. Waiting was the watchword for the day. Wait to see the doctor. Wait to get the diagnostic ultrasound that was needed. Wait for them to read the ultrasound. Wait to find out what they would do. No comfortable place to sit. Hospital food. And the room was chilly. Really chilly. And, for reasons that I will never, ever understand, the hospital pharmacy could not get his medications right. Even though we travel with a detailed list of everything he takes and WHY he takes it. Trying to give him stuff he doesn't take, while refusing to give him the things he does take and needs to have. Eventually, I came home, and packed up his medications here, and took them back with me. The nurses fuss about that. They really don't like patients taking their own medications, but tough. No choice as far as I could tell. <br />
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Finally, we heard at noon, that they would do the thrombin injection. In half an hour. Yay! Yikes! Deep tissue injection guided by ultrasound imaging. A very precise, very technical, amazing procedure. Even with some lidocaine to help numb the area, he said it was an intense experience.<br />
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Then. More waiting. More uncomfortable furniture. More marginal food. More chilly temperatures. Long, long, long day. T got done with the day's work on the jury and drove down to sit with us for an hour or so. Then, to bed. We both slept some better. Although, of course, one has to deal with all the hospital personnel that NEED whatever they think they need at midnight, and 2AM, and 3 AM, and 5 AM...<br />
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Another ultrasound this morning showed that the thrombin worked. The aneurysm was whatever it was they wanted it to be. Not sure what the actual description might be. But good. Perfect in fact. The vascular surgeons were quite happy, and at 9:00 this morning, they told us we were good to go. Yay! If only it were that easy. Hospital hierarchy and general nonsense kept us sitting there until 3PM. Only then did we finally get them to remove the IV, hand over the discharge papers, and summon a wheelchair to transport him out of there. I took off to go get the car, brought it around to the front, loaded him in, and we headed home. <br />
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Tonight, we are all home. The jury finished the case this morning. The hospital stay is ended. Our little places seem comfortable and cozy and welcoming. We've all had a real shower and a decent meal. The cats are starting to calm down. Maybe now, we can just settle down, let him heal up, and enjoy the rest of this rapidly vanishing summer. Unknownnoreply@blogger.com6