Christmas Visit

The kids are visiting for the school holidays again...

bad is when your adolescent son finds pictures on your computer of naked women, strapped to a hotel bench, bright red bottoms and obvious marks along with wide, wide smiles and glassy eyes...

really bad is when he finds them on your camera...


(okay this has not yet happened, just what I have nightmares about...)
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Paddling The Cowgirl

just a short scene about a paddling... a Halloween party, and this woman isn't just dressed as a cowgirl, she really is one, for a living, real spurs and all and if I ever objected to cowboy (cowgirl) boots with a skirt I won't any more - as long as it's a really, really short skirt.

This was one of these friend-of-a-friend things, so there was no real dynamic, just sort of "let's play" and I couldn't say for sure who said that... but we end up in a spare room, along with a few other people and a handful of straps. Talk about topping from the bottom, she left no doubt who was in charge and, not knowing her, I didn't want to push it - and it must've been working for her, her bottom was tanned pretty good but oh-so-smoothly and some of these were not light straps.

She was misbehaving with another brat, which was extremely disruptive, but we eventually got in under control - I had her bent over the back of a regular chair, holding the seat, and we moved to where the chair was against the wall and couldn't slide forward and the brats were decently separated.

By this time I had strapped her hard with several different straps, which she loved, probably spanked her some, too... all of which she soaked up like desert sand taking in rain. Narrow perfectly padded bottom on a body that was like, you couldn't decide between athletic and nice curves and this was the perfect compromise...

She complained that I was wrapping a bit so I corrected that... and then she produced a long frat paddle, I think a half-inch - thinner than I'm used to but not one of the super-thin quarter-inch ones - and full of holes, asked if I knew how to use it - I said "sure, this is my end, that's your end" - which made her scowl... but after a couple of swats - she was still bent over the back of this lightweight chair - she stood up and said I was over-hitting, to focus on the near cheek and let the far take care of itself (partly because the paddle, being thin and full of holes, was more flexible than I'm used to, and her bottom was not entirely as wide as I'm used to). I tried again and got "nope, too far, nope, too far..." finally got it about right... for a couple... then she stood up and said no again - I offered to tied her arms to the chair... she knew I was serious - I was dressed as Indiana Jones and had rope hanging from my belt - and said no... got her to bend over again and laid one on that I knew was good - the heaviness with which I was swatting her was also making the paddle flex more... she said that was good and I suggested that she count the good ones out loud and could skip the ones she didn't like... she counted one and two - and I mean, I laid into her... skipped the next one, counted the third and jumped up saying "enough, I want to be able to play for the rest of the party..." anyway, great fun...

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A little too far...

I took the plastic top off of a scented candle and it says on it - "Recycle Before Use." Has this maybe gone a bit far?

How about we take it straight from the store to the recycle bin? I mean, okay, I probably have done with a few things, but there were years in my closet in between...

I'm not even sure how you'd know if you recycled something before you used it, or not - or if someone else had. Do you think it would say on the label?

Sleeping on planes

been on a couple of long plane trips lately, and I always take a sleepmask, especially on the red-eye - you know, those blue, silky on one side, padded things...

but somewhere in my collecting I picked up this blindfold - not too directly kinky - fluffy lined eye cups, thin black leather, but nice... probably ought to be wearing this, huh?

the picture kind of sucks, we'll see if we can show it on someone...

no telling who I might meet...

Bad Santa

If you haven't got any kids around, check out Bad Santa with Billy Bob Thorton and Lauren Graham:



if you have got kids around, learn to look at a DVD's rating before you put it in...

What's this got to do with spanking? Nothing except that this Gilmore Girl certainly earns one or two (lifetimes worth) in this cute little role...

St. Petersburg, Florida, 2008

I'm sitting at the table in the entry of Suite 7804 late Saturday night, the last night of the last party on a four-month string of scenes and dates that has left my heart trampled, my direction obscure, and my sanity in question. The door's on the latch as it always is and it swings open, its frame filled by the woman who started it all, all six-plus feet of her atop high heels and displaying the kind of curves that'll put a scenic railway in the guidebook. Black halter top, hot pink panties and signature glasses, "Moonie" is celebrating ten years since the founding of the original Florida Moonshine by offering free swats. Oh - and the panties, about four feet off the ground, are backless.



It seems like every bit of ten years that I've been promising to make it to a Florida party, but in truth the Florida Moonshine group as I know it - the current one - was started back up by Tony and Gail, Ian, and Alona back in 2005 or so - so it couldn't really be that long that I've been trying to get here. Even so...

I get off the shuttle in front of the hotel and immediately realize that I haven't been on an East Coast beach since I was fifteen. On the Pacific you don't get the heat and humidity this close to the water, and the feeling, the sense of it, is unmistakable. Boardwalks and crazy dreams of summer romance rush back with an immediacy that make it seem like yesterday - or at the very least, last summer. Of course, no one here calls this the East Coast - it's the West, or Gulf Coast. And I could not have chosen a better destination for my first visit to Florida - the beach at St. Pete has graced plenty of postcards, I'm sure; the view from my balcony is only surpassed by the view from my door.

We'll have to see what can be said and what can be hinted at and what is better kept to myself, but cutting right to the chase scene - was it better than Shadow Lane? Ian wants everyone on the planet there next year and every positive word helps - so I'll say this much: it was perfect. It was just what I needed just when I needed it. Everyone I knew welcomed me; everyone I met welcomed me. The setting was beautiful; of course the women were beautiful. One guy turns leather into art; another handles a whip with a touch that leaves his partners with open mouths and glazed eyes. It was relaxed; it was exciting. It was, in a word, "nice." After the dungeons of Dom Con, after the weekends spanning Sacramento, San Francisco and San Jose followed by Central California and Orange County, after I-5 has become yet another viewing of the same in-flight movie, it was perfect.

Did I miss my fabulous California crowd? Did I miss the familiarity of Ventura Boulevard, the Riviera, South Coast Plaza and the Strip? Eight video vixens on the bed? Shadow Lane is Shadow Lane, LA is LA, what can I say? Don't ask me to dis my home town. So no, no comparisons... but God, what a party... what a great time. Thank you - everyone. For everything.



This strap hurts, I know it, that's why I've chosen it. Slant-tipped, barely wider than it is thick, cut from reins for a Clydesdale. And I'm laying it on. But she is feeling guilty, she needs to feel it. Her bottom is well warmed-up, maybe too warmed up. I lay a practice stroke across her thighs, and a second. She says that's what she needs. When I make her.

Six across the bottom, hard... three across the thighs that make my teeth grind. She doesn't move, at least not much - maybe because her ankles are wrapped tight and I've tied her hands to the bedpost. Six and three, six and three - she is clearly suffering, the print of nine strokes standing out, short and rectangular on her near thigh, long across the other, the slant-cut clearly visible on the far side. Six more across her bottom. I pause and put my mouth by her ear, a whisper asking her to ask me to not give her the last three - she's had enough, I tell her. She's a good girl and does as I ask. I spend the next three hours in a state of relaxed satisfaction - filled or drained, I can't tell which... but the near panic of the past four, or five, or six months is palatable in its absence.

TPE, Vanilla Style

I had an interesting experience over the weekend (well, some recent weekend) in a very vanilla fashion. For what seems like all my life – at least back to junior high school, anyway – I've been the one in my relationships who made the plans and decisions and was expected to know and consider – in fact, honor - my partner's preferences. You might question whether I was the dominant party or they were just letting me do all the work, but that's really beside the point - I'm not accustomed to being on the submissive end of Total Power Exchange.

In any event, this particular weekend a friend invited me to Washington DC and I was anxious for a chance to see her. Since I'd never been, and the place is full of sights and all, my friend assumed that I was anxious to see the place – plus, no doubt, she wanted to show off her city where she's lived for 20+ years. So, despite the fact that she's a bottom, she immediately set off to make a schedule for us to best utilize our time in the Capital (I always say that the first thing a top needs to control is time).

I assured her repeatedly that I was coming to see her, against this backdrop of history, rather than the backdrop itself – and that whatever we did, together, would be fine with me. Since I myself have heard this response many times before - only to later hear of the many exceptions to "fine," I resolved to stick to it myself. She did check with me on a few of her suggestions and all of them were not only completely acceptable but very inviting. Really, though, I gave her very little help, expressing no food or drink preferences except for an absence of onions (which she honored) and wine, which she ignored. She chose the route, she chose the menu, she chose the schedule and itinerary and everything else.

I think I did a good job of being obedient. I didn't second-guess, I didn't criticize, I stuck (easily) to my position that anything we did together was a pleasurable undertaking. When things inevitably went wrong, I was supportive. I reassured her – probably ten or twenty times a day – that I would be happy to participate in whatever she suggested, with or without knowing what it would entail.

Odd as it may sound, this was a new or at least rare experience for me, having someone else willingly take responsibility for everything – and what a great and relaxing time I had! I'm afraid that my hostess didn't find my visit as relaxing but we did both have a really excellent time. I seldom, if ever, looked at my watch, never worried about the wait for the metro, or weighed alternatives for crossing downtown (well, the White House neighborhood) late on Saturday night. I was a little lucky in that, having committed myself to eating whatever she came up with for dinner, it turned out to be totally delicious and the only effort required was to stop. I didn't set the alarm in the morning and when it went off I didn't bother to find out what time it was; nor did I worry how much time we had to get in a good night's sleep.

I'm not saying that this is going to initiate any long-term changes, but it did definitely broaden my perspective a bit...

Blame

So now I'm old. Last Friday, the 29th, was my on-line birthday, making me 40, as one particularly astute correspondent pointed out. So I'm old. Last Friday wasn't my real life birthday, which comes in October, making me Libra, balanced but judging. Which I try not to do - I want to understand and analyze and accept. If I look at the last ten years, I hope "analyze and accept" describes how I've developed.

I never thought about profiles showing my age changing, only about them showing my birthday, so I list February 29 as one more non-fact of anonymity. I assumed that any real person - as opposed to spam robot - who saw it would figure it was made up, just like the way I list my zip code sometimes as 90210. It's funny when I get spam saying "Hi I just moved to Beverly Hills and want to meet some cute single guys so it sounds like you fit the bill." Obviously spam (okay, obvious on a number of fronts). And no, I don't live on the set of an abandoned TV show, though sometimes I feel that way.

But these little deceptions don't get around the fact that time is passing and I am getting older and as I get older it is easier and easier to give up some things. I listened to an REM CD - nothing says "this is 1990" like a solid series of REM songs - including "Blame." I have given up my belief in Blame.

Blame, like Credit, expands as you share it. The more you keep for yourself, the less there is to go around. So I try to act accordingly.

I had a job once where Blame was our main focus. We had more workers than work and were all waiting to be axed in a seemingly endless series of lay-offs. We had little to do but to study Blame. Whenever a mistake was made, no matter how seldom, we would convene a team to form a policy to prevent its future occurrence. It didn't matter if our recommendations required far more work than simply fixing the occasional mistake when it occurred - we as a company were dedicated to the eradication of mistakes even at the "expense" of effort required, since we had excess people on hand.

The one good purpose of the Blame Game is to look at things you did wrong and want to swear never to do again. Maybe it makes you feel more secure hoping that you can keep a bad experience from ever recurring. We're all learning, aren't we?

Well, now I'm old - at least on-line and soon in real life. Maybe I've given up on learning. Maybe I'm starting to think "it's not what happens to you but how you recover that's important." I have already long thought that my mistakes were a reflection of my personality and accepted (after analysis) that I am actually pretty darn likely to make them again.

Cat is no longer here, after so intimately sharing every aspect of my life for so long - but I have nothing to point to and say "I'll never do that again." Probably not even that I'll try never to do that again. Did we make some mistakes? Yes, I'm sure we did and I did. Do I regret any of it? Only that we couldn't find a way to make it work. Did I, or we, give up too soon? No. We tried as hard as we could, we tried everything we could. Did I, or we, let it go too long? No. We wanted to keep trying, there's no blame in that. Should I, or we, have foreseen that it would turn out as it did? Maybe - but if we did I would have still taken the chance on it.

Maybe this means that at some point in the future I will be back to exactly where I am now, which is far from perfect. Maybe it means that I will enjoy several or many years of my life but not develop, not progress, not learn from my mistakes at all. I think I can accept that, which I suspect is a sign of getting old.

The company I worked for did manage to eliminate a lot of mistakes - but it didn't make them perfect. Maybe it didn't make them disappear, but it certainly didn't prevent it. I think for me, personally, I will rather go on making mistakes and trying to recover than being paralyzed with fear or suffocated with caution.

A Little Rope, a Glass of Wine, and Thou...

I've recently developed something of an interest in Japanese rope bondage – started some months ago when Cat got me a gift of ropes and books from Twisted Monk, a very cool dude (at www.twistedmonk.com). The book I most like is Shibari You Can Use, maybe because I'm not used to crafts instructions and they make things very clear, despite having to repeat themselves a lot. By now I also have Bondage for Sex, which focuses on positions of exposure, and Cat had gotten me The Seductive Art of Japanese Bondage by Midori, with my favorite photographer, Craig Morey. The last one is not always as straightforward as the first two, so that's the order I've been reading them in.

Apparently Japanese rope bondage utilizes "reverse tension" as a basis for its technique. This is pretty simple but I've found it to provide some very secure yet comfortable bonds – so I've been told, repeatedly. They do tend to use a lot of rope, but it's a huge improvement over what we've been trying since we were kids – ties that are too tight and still slip off, or really narrow and cut in, or have huge impossible knots. I'm sure somewhere Japanese rope bondage uses some fancy knots – why wouldn't it? but I haven't needed them yet.

Also, the bonds are usually pretty attractive. I don't have any photos yet, because none of my partners (so far) have been real big on having their picture taken, let alone posted... so, still looking on that one. I do have a great new camera, though – just a little Canon point-and-shoot but I can turn the lights on and shoot without a flash, most of the time, and the pictures are terrific.

All the same, certain traits crop up whatever the subject – I'm trying to force myself to have patience and gain some experience with the ties in the book, which tend to be rope-only. What I really would like to do, I imagine, is to mix rope and rattan and do something less common. I'd say "original" but any time I do someone always says "oh yes, did you see that at www.I've_done_that_already.com?" or some damn thing... well, someday – in the meantime, more practice...