Who I am and what this is

I am a middle-aged man living in New York City who has taken his first steps into the amazing world of S&M. I consider myself extremely lucky to have connected with an exceptional person to guide me along this path: Miss Mitsu, one of the Dommes at Rapture.

The current phase of my journey began on a cold and cloudy day last November when I had my first session with Mitsu, but my interest/fascination/obsession with the worlds of kink and S&M has very deep roots. Something I am learning about myself is that I am a masochist. I intend to use this space to explore exactly what that means.

To begin at the beginning would be to go all the way back to when I was about three years old. This is an incident I have no memory of, but my mother has told me the story multiple times. Mom was working in the garden and I was playing outside. She heard me crying and came running. According to her, I was standing at the fence that separated our yard from our neighbor’s yard. The two next door neighbor boys were poking me in the belly with sticks. I just stood there, bleeding and crying while they jabbed away.

My earliest memory of auto-erotic sado-masochism is from when I was maybe 7 or 8 years old. There’s a Buggs Bunny cartoon called “From Hare to Heir” (1960) that contains this exchange between Yosemite Sam and his Advisor (who has a huge, phallic nose):

Advisor: But Sire, there is no more money. Your uncle, the king, has cut off your allowance.
Yosemite Sam: You know the penalty for not having the books balanced!
Advisor: Oh no. Not the ‘nose-in-the-book’ penalty.
Yosemite Sam: Yeah, the nose-in-the-book.
[Advisor puts his nose in the book and Sam slams it]
Yosemite Sam: WE’VE GOTTA GET SOME MONEY!

I acted out this scene by myself, but instead of slamming my nose in a book, I slammed my cock in the toilet seat.

Hmmm…

There’s plenty more where that came from, which I’ll write about here from time to time.

For now I’ll just explain the title of this blog.

Mitsu has kept a blog for a while, and I often write her long e-mails about what’s going on inside my brain before and after our sessions. Last week she suggested I post some of those thoughts to a blog, so here we are.

I kicked around a few ideas for the title “Masochism World,” “The Masochist Monk,” “The Center of the Cyclone” and others. A few days ago I was reading a book by Alan Watts called What is Zen? and I sent Mitsu this quote:

The whole point of Zen is to suspend the rules we have superimposed on things and to see the world as it is — as all of a piece. This has to be done in a special setting of some kind, because you can’t just gaily walk out into the street and suspend the rules. And if you do, you’ll create traffic confusion of every conceivable kind! But we can set up a certain environment in which we have an agreement to suspend the rules — that is to say to meditate, to stop thinking for a while, to stop making formulations.

When I first climbed the stairs to Rapture over six months ago, the last thing I expected was a reawakening of my interest in Zen philosophy and Buddhism. But this journey is way more complicated than I ever imagined, thanks to the brilliant wide-ranging mind of Miss Mitsu.

I have come to see my times at Rapture with Mitsu as the special setting in which I can safely suspend the rules. Rules about what your body is for; rules about pleasure and pain; rules about what part of the brain gets to run the show.

The title is also perfect because one of the things I enjoy immensely is suspension bondage. There’s something indescribable about being bound with ropes and hoisted into the air. The total vulnerability; the total faith in my Mistress; the endorphin rush; the whole damn package is mind blowing.

Mind-blowing. That’s probably my favorite way to describe the experiences I have had so far. I’m eager to keep exploring the limits of both my mind and my body with the guidance of the incredibly skilled, wicked smart, and utterly gorgeous Mitsu.