Category Archives: Personal – my pathetic life

State of the author: stuff I don’t usually talk about

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People seeing this photo, which I took about five minutes ago, will think I look terrible. They’re right, I do.

But I think, “This is me just four days after scalpel surgery and then laser surgery on my face, and I’m recovering very fast.”

I think that because I’ve spared people the photos of me on days 1, 2, and 3, when my face looked like I’d been beaten up by the secret police, then pushed out of a car at high speed, then dragged by another car, and then rolling into the gutter, where people kept kicking my face for what must have seemed to them to be good reasons of their own. 

The mutant’s progress

Day 1: I looked reptilian, because the flow of lymph fluid puffed up my face, and blew up the pouches round my eyes so I could barely see out of them. Mostly couldn’t see out of my right eye. 

Day 2: The eye stuff had drained a little into the rest of my face. The rest of my face now looked like it had been inflated with a bicycle pump. I looked pig-like, though I was happy with that because at least I’d re-joined the mammalian order. 

Day 3: I looked dead. You know the annoying guy who’s the first to meet the aliens when they land on earth, and they kill him and use his animated corpse to pass on threatening messages and generally do their work? I looked like him, the deranged evangelist whose rotting face makes dogs howl and children scream and run.

My nose was black, and swollen in an odd way that made it look like it’d fallen off and been hurriedly stuck back on with glue. Still, at least now I was back to looking human. 

Day 4: Here I am. It looks nasty, but believe me, I’ve been looking at worse, lately. I feel about half-way back to being myself. The face colorisation is still weird, but most of the swelling’s gone, and the discolorisation is starting to fade, a little.

My face is shiny because I’ve rubbed a lot of haemorrhoid gel into it. The gel contains steroids to help repair, and has a mild anaesthetic effect. So you don’t have to stick haemorrhoid cream or gel up your ass; it has other uses.

Cancer scar

For the cancer op scarring under my lip, I’m using a light silicon gel as a wound dressing, as it’s supposed to reduce scarring. 

Yesterday, the surgeon called me and said they got it all. I’m at the lowest possible risk of having to have more taken out later. So that’s good.

Top tip!

I recommend haemorrhoid cream or gel, by the way, for people who’ve been severely caned, strapped or whipped, and have to have their bottom back in socially acceptable condition within a few days. It’s an effective way of reducing bruising. See? Everything links back to bdsm, really. 

 

Healing is hard work

Healing is hard work. I’ve just slept most of the way round the clock. I have so much to do, and no energy at all. 

How do I feel?

I’m not in pain, or not much pain. I feel better than I look.

I’m taking steroids, on medical advice, to speed the healing. I’m finding that they fuck with my sleep, which is probably one of the reasons I’m so tired now. I was also prescribed codeine, and I think from now on I’ll use paracetamol during the day, and the codeine at night to help me shut down. 

I’m relieved the cancer thing is over. Though I mostly just shelved thinking about it, and never worried all that much. So life rewards irresponsible insouciance, sometimes. 

I’m grateful to the people who care about me and even manage to love me, and to science and the medical profession. I’m kind of amazed that I’m not more unhappy about all this, but the thing is, I can see an upwards path and I feel pretty positive.

And if you’re going to Eroticon, I’m looking forward to seeing you in about a fortnight. By then I’ll have a new face, or rather my usual one back. 

The State of your Author

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I wrote a novel about Frank Harris, Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll and the young Aleister Crowley about four years ago. It had too many characters and the plot was far too complicated. Also the strongest sequence came in the middle. It should either be the beginning or the end.

It’s called Harris’s Adventures Underground, after the original title of Alice in Wonderland. Anyway, there were major structural issues, and there was a problem with Frank Harris’s voice, as the narrator.

Frank Harris is, in  sense, the opposite of Harry Flashman, George MacDonald Frazer’s anti-hero. Flashman was a coward, and various other sorts of bad man, but he was utterly honest and reliable in his “Flashman” memoirs.

Harris was a brave man, and mostly decent, but he could never resist improving any story he was involved in. As a result, you can never quite believe that what he writes is what really happened. 

Harris wrote a lot, though few people have read anything more than his autobiography, My Life and Loves. But his style is very unfashionable now, and it was hard to write in his voice while still being readable and immediate. 

I put it aside to work on other things. Now I’ve finished those other things, and I’m back to it. 

It needs a lot of editing, and some new scenes. And I think I have a solution to the “voice” problem, though I’ll find out as I write it. But I think there’s something very strong there. So that’s my new project.

A side-effect is that until it’s done, my blog and my writing will have no cross-over. I think I’ll find that strange. What, no bdsm? What, writing in someone else’s voice? 

But I’ll keep writing this blog at the same rate as now. I may do more shorter stories, since I’ve nearly got enough for a volume of bdsm-related, but also person-related, short stories. With interlocking characters. Maybe it’s the bdsm equivalent of “Slaves of New York”. Or some such.

And some things, like the Maddie saga, will go on forever, probably, unless I think of an ending.

(“Well,” gasped Maddie on her deathbed, “getting run over was unexpected, but it’s all been tremendous fun.”) 

For now, I have three books to sell. Two novels and a non-fiction book on bdsm.

I’ve recently finished proof-reading them, and I found that it’s nice when you read something you wrote, and it’s well polished, and it feels real. The people act and speak credibly, each according to their own motivations , and they’re neither better nor worse than real people. Also, all three books are often sexy, sometimes sad and often funny. I feel good about them: they are good enough to be proud of.

On the other hand, I know that I’m shit at selling myself, commercially speaking, and… Well, frankly, the marketing issue scares the hell out of me. 

I’m coming to Eroticon in London in March of this year, and I’m looking forward to meeting a lot of lovely people.  I also hope I can get published and make a non-insulting amount of money out of that visit and those meetings that may arise from it. 

I don’t write abou 

I am the god of hellfire! And I bring you

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Fire!

I woke up about one in the morning on Monday, and out my bedroom window there was this:

So I pulled clothes on and went outside. Even in the five-ten minutes since I woke up it had spread. And it was closer, now about 50 metres from my house. The firefront now looked like this. 

I went off and hooked up my hose pump, and put the inlet in my swimming pool. It can pump out water at the same volume as the pump on a firetruck. Hooked up to the pool it can keep on pumping at high volume for 45 minutes. That should be enough for me to cover my place, and the neighbours on both sides, wetting the houses and the bush around them thoroughly, and then take care of fires started by flying embers. 

I primed the pump, started the engine, and… no water came out. 

Fortunately the Rural Fire Service people turned up with about ten trucks, and got to work. 

So I ran around, making sure the neighbours were okay, the firies had the access they needed, and stuff like that. I’m not the hero or even a hero; lots of people in the hood were doing stuff like that.  

I went back to the pump, and finally got it working. So the professionals were now tackling the fire, and I just patrolled the perimeter, ready to douse any local fires started by embers blowing in the wind. By about four in the morning it was mostly out. 

I got back to bed about five, adrenalin and exhaustion battling it out. In the morning I went and inspected the scorched earth. There’s a very clear line between the fire and the green. That line is about 45 metres from my bedroom window.

Yesterday, I had a chunk of, well, meat, pulled out of my face, to get biopsied to see if I have cancer. I don’t think I do, by the way. But a biopsy is a significant assault on the body, so all I’m capable of writing, at the moment, is this bit of factual reporting. 

I’ve got some thoughts about why we (I mean humans, but possibly especially kinky people) think fire is sexy,

Especially arsonists, it seems. This fire was deliberately lit. People heard four incendiaries exploding before the flames started. But I haven’t got the focus to write about that at the moment.

I’ll write Wicked Wednesday tomorrow morning. And the Fire and Sex post will be Thursday or Friday. Good luck to everybody!

Home alone Christmas: Mismanaging my life

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Two years ago I hosted about 30 people for Christmas. It was a lot of fun. There was the roaring and giving out presents thing, which I’m good at. And making the table and seating for all guests, which involved removing a door and using it as one of the tops for the long table. (Re-hanging the door afterward was a massive pain in the arse, by the way. Use your doors as tabletops if you have to, but expect a lot of work.)

Then last year I was only host to my ex-girlfriend and her mother and idiot brother. I like her mother, and, since she was instrumental, as an expert witness, in defeating the government’s attempt to ban Portnoy’s Complaint, I’m proud of her. She prefers the 19th century novel, so she’s less proud of that than I am.  

This year, I’m Home Alone for Christmas. Just me, rattling about an empty house.

But it’s ok, I’m going to enjoy myself. With Moet and duck. There shall be a fire. With enough Moet I’ll dance around it.

Where’s that confounded maypole!?

And then I’m going to make sure this doesn’t happen next year.

 

In the air tonight (my girl is)

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Suggestive pose! She’s been working on choreography for a moose movie

My girl is flying towards me. So life is good. 

In fact, she’s just now cleared the Arctic and arrived in Kiruna. If I were a road, I’d end in Kiruna. If I were a person, I’d end it all, in Kiruna. Unless I had a ticket on, up and out. Which my girl, fortunately for all of us, does.

Next stop is somewhere in the damn world, then it’s me!

So: you want to know about my problems?

Somewhere – damned if I know where – I put my pussy-whip down and didn’t put it away.

Where the fuck is it?

Generally I’m a cunt-sayer, when I refer to lovely ladyparts, so I should logically say “cuntwhip”. But there’s a misogynist expression, “pussywhipped”, referring to a man who takes women’s needs seriously, that’s meant to discourage men from doing that. So I like to pervert the term, to refer to a real whip. I suppose it could also be used as a cockwhip, though not by my hands.

Anyway, it’s short, it’s cute, but unlike my girl it’s multi-thonged. I’m afraid I don’t know where it is, though.

So I’ll have to tidy my office, until I find it. Then, I shall use my pussywhip to whip my girl’s cunt. And her nipples. In particular.

I’ve got bigger worries than that, though. I hope she still loves me, in the flesh. There’s no reason why she shouldn’t, having managed to love me in the first place, I guess. But we’re anxious little creatures, we humans. I have no doubts about whether I love her, or how much. 

And where in the fuck is this?

Beyond that, I intend to collar her. But I haven’t found a good collar yet. I’m after a day collar, not some leather dog collar thing with bolts, spikes and tether points. I’m looking for something more subtle, full of meaning but not too obvious to others.

So she can wear it in the vicinity of her mother, say, without setting her off. 

Can I get a good collar, in time to collar my girl? This is on-going, with no guarantee of the good, happy ending. Stay tuned!

I’m also hoping to introduce her to the joys of anal sex. And myself to the joy (I have no doubt) of having my cock in her rectum. But I’ll desist if she’s not enjoying, or is hurting more than is fun. So… can I manage that difficult… passage? I hope so, but I don’t know. 

And keeping her happy. My girl deserves a good break and a good time. Regular fuckings and spankings will help, obviously. But her energy reserves are low, and food intake needs to be regular though usually small. She is very low and miserable if she runs out of fuel, so I need to be always ready to provide something small and just right. Can I manage? I intend to, that’s for certain. 

And then, within all the parameters, there has to be room for joy.  Girl bound, and joy unbound!

And the collared girls go, doop de-doop de-doop…

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I am going to collar a girl I love. 

I haven’t a lot to say about that. First, in general, when writing about anyone on this blog I apply a five-year rule, so that nothing gets on this blog before five years have passed. This is mainly for confidentiality, so that even if someone works out my secret identity as a policy advice guy for governments, they won’t be able to tell which woman any particular story concerns. 

And second, I give false names and make sure key details are misleading. So if someone is a lab technician, for example, I’ll say here that she’s a chemist. If she’s short I might say she’s tall, or not mention it. Mentions of hair colour is usually incorrect, but not reliably so.

So what I’m about to say feels very strange to me. I’m going to collar the beautiful and clever Zoe, who blogs here. Never think the simple truth is simple: it took a real internal fight to make myself give that correct information. Out loud. 

The only other thing to say is that she’s somewhat nervous. But my pledge to my readers, especially one of them, is that I’ll go slow, gentle, and only fierce when I’m sure the mood wants to be fierce. 

And giving a collar may present itself as a kind of ownership, but that’s largely rhetoric, to help intensify the emotional intimacy between the collar-giver and the collar-wearer. The fact that we consciously know it’s rhetorical doesn’t prevent that rhetoric from having its desired emotional and erotic effect. 

What a collar definitely is, is a symbol of love: both giving and accepting the collar are huge and powerful statements and admissions of love. 

 

 

What giving a collar means to me

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I’m going to collar a girl in a few weeks’ time.

Squee!

Er, in a manly, dommy, voice, of course. Ahem.

There are a few minor issues that have to be dealt with first, like her giving me enthusiastic consent. Which is half-given, but I consider that it’s still subject to conditions at present. But once those trifling formalities are over, she shall be given and wear my collar. 

So what does that collar mean, when I give it to this very specific person? 

Commitment and love

A standard slave collar. Note that the designer provided rings for three leashes! The Bible says you can’t serve two Masters. Obviously,  three’s all right though

The first thing it means is that I love her and I trust, to the state of knowledge, that she loves me. And I commit to her. I’m no longer looking. And whether she likes it or not, I consider it my duty, as a dom with a collared sub, to look after her, and to work to achieve her safety and happiness. She affirms the equivalent. We are a dominant and a submissive, and each of us is focussed on the other.

This is simple enough, and it’s the reciprocal aspect of a collar, the part that means roughly the same to the dominant and the submissive. 

Submission

The second thing it means is that she’s my submissive. But that status, “my collared submissive”, can mean a range of things, on a continuum. 

At one end of that scale it would mean she would address me as Master, and have to obey any command I give her, concerning any aspect of her life. I would have an absolute right to discipline her, for my pleasure or because she has displeased me. (The three things that I’m most likely to punish memorably for are self-destructive behaviour, which can include inaction, disobedience and disrespect other than playful cheekiness.

In that version of submission, she is my property. An owned girl. 

At the other end of the continuum, it means she retains her own decision-making, independent of me for most of her life, but she is submissive to me in and around the bedroom. Her submission is sexual, and not anything else. 

The rhetoric of lovers

These two styles aren’t in practice so different. There are some practical differences, but in reality the major difference is the intensity of the rhetoric.

All lovers use rhetoric when they speak to each other. Two people, having just fucked, may look each other in the eye and swear that they will love the other forever, till the day they die.

There are some tacky slave collars out there. This one could actually be worse than jazz…

In reality they may part within the year, because one of them eats mandarins in bed and the other wants to listen to jazz on the radio when they wake up in the morning.

Jazz would be a deal-breaker for me, by the way. I’d never swear undying love to someone who listened to jazz in the bedroom. Once I discovered that horrible jazz thing, it’d be a one-off, a one-night stand. Um, all right, this might be a digression. 

But the fact that they parted doesn’t mean they were insincere when they swore undying love. And if you understood the rhetoric, it doesn’t even make what they said untrue. They were looking for words to express how enchanted and wonderful they felt, and they used those words.

The literal meaning of their words wasn’t the point; the meaning was the emotion they expressed.

Bdsm lovers’ rhetoric

So I might say to a submissive, “I own you; you are my property, to do with as I choose.” And she might say, “Oh god yes, I am yours, Master.” Then we sign a contract to that effect.

But if she feels bad in the relationship, and she no longer loves and respects me, she doesn’t really transgress that agreement if she leaves.

I could take her to Court, showing the contract in which she agreed that she was my property and my slave. “Look!” I’d say, “it’s signed in blood!” And the Court would laugh its fool ass off at me. A bdsm slave contract is worth the the paper it’s written on, in reality. Less, actually, because that sheet of paper’s got words scribbled all over it. 

So in a sense, the rhetoric of ownership, of a collared submissive, really means: “I feel this passionate urge to be your dominant, to take and enjoy your submission, and I feel it very intensely. And I want to go on feeling it intensely, with you.”

It’s emotionally real. It’s never practically or legally real; a submissive cannot really give up direction and control over her life, except voluntarily while she wants to.

Love, again

The day collar. Something that can be worn in public, with some discretion. I’ll be looking for something on these lines…

So to me, the collar mainly represents loving commitment between a dominant and submissive. Beyond that it means a subtly moving bdsm commitment, with boundaries that extend and recede from day to day and moment to moment, under which the submissive commits to a presumption towards submission when the dominant evokes the bdsm or D/s part of the relationship. 

That means, if I say, “girl, take your clothes off and kneel”, I expect to get obedience.

But if I said, “you will tell your mother about us, so she understands that you are my submissive, and that if she has any requests of you she must direct them through me,” I expect to get, at least, discussion. Or a flat, “fuck off”. 

So I see the gift and acceptance of the collar not as an end-point but at a stage in a process. A declaration of love and commitment, and presumption towards submission when I flash out my dominant side: those are good starting points.  

The collar is the outward sign of the commitment that allows us to find the right level of bdsm for us, and work our ways to the sweet level that best suits us both. 

Gay marriage and becoming an Australian

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I’m living in Australia at the moment, but I’m not an Australian. There’s always been too much about the country that makes me feel like I don’t want to join it, or identify with it. 

There’s the racism, in particular.

I’m not talking about the stuff where someone is making conversation and asks a person who is black or Asian, “Where are you from?” Because there’s a possible sub-text of, “If you’re not white, you’re not from here” about it. But it can also be a well-meaning but under-informed person who means, “I think you look fantastic! Where do they make more people like you?”

My point is, it’s always a clueless question to ask, and sometimes there might be a negative racist meaning to it, and sometimes there might not be. But my sympathies aren’t always with the person taking offence. A little bit of polite person-to-person education goes a lot further, and does more good, than all the offence-taking in the world.

Anyway, when I say Australia is a racist country I’m not talking about that kind of thing.

Rather, it’s about the deliberatively, knowingly genocidal history of what has been done to the Aboriginal people. And the incredible, shockingly callous endorsement of that genocide by a fuck of a lot of Australians, once you get them in private. They don’t even need to have a drink in their hand. The day after I arrived in Australia, some quite wealthy, educated guy said to me, “oh, Abos: they should have put out more poisoned flour sacks.” 

Then I was in a Post Office and I saw a police notice. They wanted to know if the public had seen some offender. The ad said, “non-Australian appearance”. What that meant was that he wasn’t white. Then I was talking to a cop, who said it was a pity we’d moved out of the old days when they’d just take Aboriginal young men down to the station and “give them a bit of a flogging”. He was a young cop. By “the old days”, he’d mean “about five years ago”. 

It’s about the fact that life expectancy for Aboriginal people in their own country is fifteen years less than any other statistical group. Fifteen fucking years. 

And so on. And their media is run almost entirely by Rupert Murdoch, and leans so far to the right it’s lying on its side. And “lying” is the word. “Bullying of people who dare to speak out” are also the right words to describe Australia’s craven, contemptible media. 

So I don’t love Australia. I love many Australians, and like a lot of others. But the vibe of the place: No, I don’t love that. 

Now a group of right-wing nutters and church-ridden homophobes are trying to stop marriage equality from coming to Australia. They’d decided to put the issue to a postal survey, which is calculated to favour the group most opposed to gay marriage, that is, the over-65s, while cutting out the group – just about everyone 30 and under – who most favour gay marriage. 

Knowing that no one in that group uses postal mail, or checks their letter box, any more. It’s a “survey” where the homophobes get to have their thumb on one side of the scales. 

So … I’m going to have to become an Australian citizen. Not because I love a sun-burned country. The truth is that I don’t. But I approve of love, and if people want to marry the person they love, I’m not going to let a bunch of heartless bigots keep them from having that right. 

 

Update:

In the end I couldn’t do it. 

I can’t join a country that does to its indigenous peoples, and to refugees, what Australia does.

So I let same sex marriage win without me.

The Government did its best to bias it in favour of the lunatics on the Christian Right, which includes more than half the current government, but polls started to make it obvious that the goodies were going to defeat the bigots by a humiliating margin. So I don’t feel too bad. But I hope Australia sorts out its racism problem. Soon.

Bdsm guilt, and doing good works

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Being into bdsm means knowing that you’re different from most of the people around you. I learned that early. I was with my older brothers and sisters – who didn’t want a 4-year old’s company, but my parents hadn’t given them any choice – and they went to an abandoned forest workers’ hut, that happened to be in the neighbourhood.

For generations, children and adolescents had been going there to play sex games.

Bottles got spun and boys kissed girls, girls cuddled boys, and the penalty for losing a round of any game they played was taking off an item of clothing. And so on.

Anyway, I was much younger so I didn’t take part. I mostly climbed up the shelves on the wall, and found a place where I could look down if I wanted to. A lot of the time I just day-dreamed. But one day they played a game of “school”, where, at the end of each round, someone got spanked. A girl called Donna getting spanked caught my attention, very strongly.

With my little four-year-old hard-on. 

That’s not “why” I’m into bdsm, of course. I was already into bdsm before I entered that shed; I just didn’t know about it. Rather, it was the first time I realised that this was something I was into. It was going to be important to me. And it wasn’t important, it seemed, to anyone else who’d been in that shed. 

But it didn’t take very long to find out some other things. The first is that this is a minority sexuality. My friends weren’t interested. It was just me.

The second thing I learned was even less welcome: people who had this sexual interest weren’t admired and respected, to put it mildly. 

People like me were the villains in movies and TV shows. We were evil. We were sick. I was a priggish little bastard when I was a kid, so I wasn’t happy about being evil. I wanted a moral pass-mark, at least.  

So I devoted most of my life to Good Works. My first job was as a psychiatric nurse. Then I did a social work degree. I helped set up the first domestic violence women’s refuge in my part of the world. I set up the first union for unemployed people that’d existed, in my part of the world, since the 1930s. I helped set up Shelter in my part of the world.

I campaigned for, and won, changes to landlord-tenant laws that meant landlords couldn’t just go round to tenants and throw them out of the property and change the locks any more.

I went on anti-racism events and got clubbed by cops. Though ridiculously straight, I’d put on my pink triangle and go on gay rights marches and vigils. You get the picture. 

One thing that strikes me, looking back on this period, is that I hardly ever hung round with political people when I wasn’t doing politics. I didn’t actually like them very much.

I didn’t like their jockeying for power, and I didn’t want power for myself. The social changes I worked for all had the effect of sharing out power, not concentrating it. Especially not into my hands.

(The people I hung round with were more drug-oriented artist types. Much more fun, and much sexier.)

You can’t get more evil than Frank Thring. The thing simply can’t be done.

My point is that I wouldn’t have done all this, I don’t think, if I hadn’t felt guilty about being into bdsm. I wanted to be a good person. You know, not a saint, but at least not as floridly evil as a James Bond villain. Or Frank Thring.

They were all good causes, and I’m still proud of the work I did. But in part it was compensation.

It meant that in the self-critical darkness of the night I could argue to myself that I couldn’t be all bad. I might be one sick fuck, but at least I was a useful one.

Has anyone else had their life course shaped in this way, by social attitudes to bdsm?

A dom should not be an idiot

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When I arrived in Italy, I wrote off a car. It was the first time I’d driven a right hand drive vehicle. I was following a guy who was showing me the way to the castle. 

Never trust a Fiat

But though I’d said he should go slowly he set off at a pretty fast pace down narrow, winding back-country roads. I was trying to be careful by keeping to the right side of road.

Anyway, I managed to catch the tyre on a tree, and the rubber flew off and the car dropped onto the rim. The chassis was absolutely undamaged. It was just a glancing clip that took off the tyre. 

Life being what it is, this happened in front of a carload of cops, carbonieri munizipale. Though at least they took a look at it, decided I hadn’t broken any road rules, and fucked off. Anyway, I’ve listed the extenuating circumstances, but the fact is, I was at the wheel and it was my fault. 

A complete idiot and incompetent

The thing cost me 900 Euros. Worse, it took a huge chunk out of my self-confidence. I don’t like feeling a complete idiot and incompetent, and yet that was exactly the way I was feeling. A man, in particular, isn’t supposed to make mistakes like that.

I know that’s stoo-pid, but it’s what I was taught growing up. And I’d never had to confront that part of my upbringing before because I’ve never hit anything with a car before. So I felt an idiot, and I felt unmanned.

Then my love arrived to join me. She’s a good girl and my support, and I need her. So I got my shit back together. 

But it reminded me forcefully of another fact about domming. Sickness will leech away the energy and the certainty of will that makes me able to do it. So will considering myself to be an idiot. 

A dom, faking it. As we all do

A dom is supposed to have his or her shit together. She or he is supposed to be competent, and therefore reliable and trustworthy. I don’t think my girl felt the worse of me, but I did. It took real focus to lift myself up to the psychological state in which I could could dom.

We doms need certainty that we know what we’re doing and are competent. So, therefore, doms should not be idiots.