Song of Myself

When in doubt, consult Walt Whitman. “Song of Myself” begins thus:

I celebrate myself, and sing myself, 
And what I assume you shall assume, 
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. 

I loafe and invite my soul, 
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

I loafed a lot yesterday and observed many spears of summer grass as I wandered the streets and avenues of this great metropolis. That’s an excellent thing to do when one’s mind is full of swirling thought clouds. The storm still rages on, though it keeps shifting and altering itself with each passing minute.

My marks from last week continue to fade, and I am learning exactly which parts of my body take longest to mend. My cock is fine. You wouldn’t know it had been through the Mitsu wringer. Not a mark on it. My belly, on the other hand, still has some traces of bruising and faint parallel rows of pinpricks. I treasure my marks, but my girlfriend is back now, so it’s good that they’re fading away. It’s also delightful imagining the marks to come.

The past and present wilt–I have fill’d them, emptied them. 
And proceed to fill my next fold of the future. 

I love my S&M explorations. I love my girlfriend.

I’m a submissive masochistic ass-slut. I’m a sturdy and reliable lover.

Do I contradict myself? 
Very well then I contradict myself, 
(I am large, I contain multitudes.) 

We all contain multitudes. Somewhere Mitsu posted something about being uncomfortable with a label as broad as “Poly Bi Switch.” There’s nothing that needs to be labeled or resolved or defined or decided. It’s all always changing. What I was a year ago. What I was two weeks ago. What I am today. All different, but still the same. New marks on my body. New marks on my mind. Same body. Same mind. Different body. Different mind.

Not sure where it’s going, but I am enjoying the journey.

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, 
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. 

Pleasures and wayward distractions

I spent a lot of this week sleepwalking through work and obsessively tending to my wounds from last Sunday’s adventure. Last night I saw Mitsu for a video shoot and was invited to stick around to serve as a training dummy for a quick CBT lesson. And tonight I’m going to see her again. After tonight, it will probably be a few weeks before I can session with her again.

I’m sure I’m just overthinking everything, as I tend to do, but I’m just trying to cope with a whole lot of new and strange thoughts and feelings. I think the very biggest thing I’m grappling with is what I wrote in my very first entry on this blog:

Something I am learning about myself is that I am a masochist. I intend to use this space to explore exactly what that means.

Maybe it’s the result of spending so many years on the outside looking in — feeling like a cowardly “wannabe” — that makes it strange for me to accept and acknowledge that I’ve reached the other side. At this point, there really is no doubt that I find great sexual satisfaction in pain. Or, rather, sensations most people would describe as “pain” but I find quite delightful.

This shit is intense. The mental aftershocks of receiving 100 needles will last long after the wounds have faded from my flesh. I’m definitely proud of myself; I don’t regret a single thing. Acting out dark fantasies has been a deeply rewarding adventure. And loads of fun.

And maybe there isn’t anything to be figured out or decided or resolved. Maybe I’m just feeling like a shook-up snow globe right now and soon the storm in my mind will settle. Which takes me back to yoga and what Baron Baptiste says. He says something about yoga practice helping to calm the mind so that we can find that center of stillness in the midst of the storm of thoughts and feelings.

One big thing I have learned is that S&M isn’t one thing. Everybody’s kink is their own, and I’m getting a pretty good sense of what mine is. So much of it is so counter intuitive — an electrified rod down my urethra feels GOOD? — maybe that’s an obstacle to relaxing and just accepting it?

And then there’s Mitsu. I’m simply fascinated by her, and that fascination keeps changing shape. Early on, it felt very much like a high school crush — I was eager to know all the most mundane details of her life. Does Mitsu like soup? What’s her cat’s name? and so on. I think that kind of curiosity is a natural response to the clear limits on the Pro/client relationship.

Then there were times, usually the days immediately following a session, when I would embrace the unknowability. There’s a certain thrill in the contrast of intimacy and anonymity of our relationship. What would be lost if I DID know all the mundane details?

Whatever this relationship is, it’s unique. If no two people’s kinks are the same, no two D/s relationships are the same. Whatever ours is, it is wonderful.

I Go Swimming

Twenty four hours ago, I was in the middle of this:

The One Hundred Needles of Miss Mitsu

I don’t even know where to begin. We began last night with a bit of corporal punishment. We don’t do that too much, but my limits on markings were temporarily suspended.

So she tied me up, commanded me to the floor, then thrashed me. There was the initial pain, then she built up through “this is ok” to “this fucking HURTS” then on to “why are you doing this to me?” She pushed me a little farther than before with a cane at the end. I don’t know if I could have taken any more, but I’m really glad she stopped when she did.

Then it was onto the bed where she roped me up and held me down. I had a bit of wiggle room. I have no desire to escape, but I do like to see what the range of motion is for any particular rigging. I like having something there to hold me up; something utterly solid on which I can rely during the coming test.

I haven’t mentioned yet how spare the setting of the room at first appeared to be. The Silver Room felt quite empty when I arrived. When Mitsu came in she almost immediately ordered me to strip. “Don’t you want your presents first?” I asked. She allowed me to give her gifts, but then we moved right along. We often talk for a good long time, but last night, she seemed eager to get down to business.

And the business of the night was piercing.

Once I was fully restrained, Mitsu pulled boxes and boxes of needles from the cupboards, set up a tray with the requisite supplies, then set to work on my body. My body. Mine Mine Mine! I get to do whatever the fuck I want to do with it. And what I want to do with it is turn it over to Mitsu.

She sat on top of me and surveyed her blank canvas. She picked up a needle, opened a packet of lube, and started pushing needles into my tender juicy flesh.

My brain got into a thought loop: whenever a needle went in, I thought “wow, that feels like electricity.” Then I would think “But people describe electricity as feeling like pinpricks.” Over and over. Maybe you had to be there.

Three through each nipple. Fucking brilliant.

Mitsu worked her way down my torso.

The first needle in the Crown of Thorns hurts like a dog-fucking bitch. The next fifteen felt better and better.

The neglected angle on this scene is that I got to spend the better part of two hours flat on my back watching Mitsu do her thing. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but she’s a rather attractive young woman. And there she was, carefully regarding her specimen to insure symmetry of design in her needlework. My body was entirely hers. Her canvas. Her sandbox.

After the Crown of Thorns was done she paused to admire her handiwork. Mitsu counted 57 needles. That wasn’t nearly enough.

I was seriously trying to keep count of the number of needles Mitsu put through me as she worked her way down my cock and beyond. She really got a rhythm going — flipping off the caps, dipping into the lube, sliding through the skin. I remember asking her how many there were — I thought we were around 62; she said 69. I for real cannot keep numbers in my head when people are pushing needles through my dick.

Mitsu came up for air at number 80. It was decreed that we would go to one hundred — a nice round number. It only meant ten more needles on each leg. What could be finer?

At long last, Mitsu completed her design. I was released and allowed to stand to admire myself in the mirror. It was rather delicate maneuvering, but I stood and gazed and was greatly pleased. Then I returned to the bed and Mitsu began removing the needles.

That’s when the blood starts.

And now we are in an entirely new category. A completely different reality. The place we are is the place in which the command “Masturbate with your own blood” is met with eager compliance.

Just incase you don’t recall how an erection works, let me remind you. Your dick gets hard when chambers in the penis are swollen with blood. If someone has poked a bunch of holes in the end of your cock, it might get a little messy if you find yourself aroused. And what better aid to arousal than asphyxiation and face/neck pressure points? It seems to work well for me.

My cock was a dancing fountain of blood.

The horrific smear of blood and come across my torso at the conclusion of this affair truly blew my mind. This experience has left what Flagg might call an “irrevocable boot print” on my mind. I’m holding back a few details, which truly threw me over the far horizon.

And cleaning up afterward was a bitch. There exists some variety of spray bandage. Mitsu hit me with it after I showered and was about to get dressed. That stuff burns like a motherfucker. It seals up your holes and you won’t be weeping blood on your way home, but it hurts real bad. Just when you thought you were done.

I sure am glad I had the whole day off to recover today. Here’s a shot of the aftermath:

The Morning After

Not so bad, really. Not on the outside.

On the inside, there’s all sorts of chaos and confusion. There was, anyway. That has settled substantially over the last few hours.

This is what I like to do.

End transmission.

Please push pins into my body

I’ve been meaning to post something about Chris Burden and I think now is the right time. If you click on his name in the Hall of Fame on the right, it takes you to a video in which he talks about his art in the early 1970s. That’s the period that got Chris Burden a lot of attention — that’s when he did what I would call his Body Works.

For example, a performance called “Back to You.” Here’s his own description of the piece:

Dressed only in pants, I was lying on a table inside a freight elevator with the door closed. Next to me on the table was a small dish of 5/8″ steel push pins. Liza Bear requested a volunteer from the audience, and he was escorted to the elevator. As the door opened, a camera framing me from the waist up was turned on, and the audience viewed this scene on several monitors placed near the elevator. As the elevator went to the basement and returned, Liza told the audience that a sign in the elevator instructed the volunteer to “Please push pins into my body.” The volunteer stuck four pins into my stomach and one pin into my foot during the elevator trip. When the elevator returned to the floor, the door opened, the volunteer stepped out, and the camera was turned off. The elevator returned to the basement.

Four pins in the stomach and one in the foot isn’t so crazy, but he did many more extreme performances. In “Through the Night Softly” he crawled on his belly through broken glass; in “Shoot” he had a friend shoot him in the arm with a .22; in “Five Day Locker Piece” he spent five days in a locker.

I learned about Chris Burden 20 years ago when I went to see a major retrospective of his work. I think I went to that show 15 times or more. There’s so much more to his work than the body pieces that get all the attention, but what impresses me is how doing shit to his own body was at the center of so much of his work. It’s yet another one of those fascinations of mine that makes so much sense in retrospect. I was drawn to this smart and interesting artist who used his body in such extreme ways. 

I also like that he had a very loose “let’s try it and see what happens” approach. He had no idea what a volunteer would do when invited to push pins into his body. I’m trying to maintain that attitude toward my S&M adventures. 

Earlier this evening Miss Mitsu stuck many, many needles into my body.

One hundred needles.

There was a lot of blood.

Fuller details (and possibly photos) will appear soon.

[I cannot believe I wrote this just hours after that session. This guy is fucking crazy.]

Absence and Presence

I just started reading Flagg’s book The Forked Tongue. I like that he talks about the universality of body modification/body play. This sentence early on really smacked me right in the head:

Remember that the more excited someone is, the more they will consent to. (xv)

 That’s in his “Author’s Note” where he talks a lot about consent. It has been nearly six weeks since I last  saw Miss Mitsu and I’m very excited about our upcoming session. I’ve noticed that, within my fantasy realm, that excitement gives rise to visions of increasing severity and violence. I just wonder if my body is ready to receive the same degree of torment as my mind.

But at this point, my faith in Mitsu is such that I trust her to be attentive and ethical. I want to be pushed, but only by someone who knows me. That’s where I am in Flagg’s book right now — his chapter on Mindfucks where he emphasizes knowing your subject. The chapter on hypnosis was interesting. I can vouch for the amazing potential of hypnosis/trance in the BDSM setting.

I think I don’t feel like such a newbie anymore. Let’s have another look back at the Darker Days. In times past, I would have taken a peep at an S&M book in a shop, or maybe bought an issue of “Bizarre” or something and felt like a complete outsider/wannabe. Today I am reading a highly regarded brand new work and I have sufficient personal experience to fully identify with what the author is saying. 

So that’s rewarding.

And tomorrow Miss Mitsu is going to tie me up and hit me!

Let’s try some bondage…

On a rainy afternoon last November, Miss Mitsu said those words to me:

“Let’s try some bondage…”

That precise moment rings out clearly through all of my memories of my journey so far. We began our first session together with an excellent conversation about my previous experiences, my limits, and my fantasies. Mitsu smoked a cigarette and listened and talked. Then she stubbed out the end of her cigarette and said, “Let’s try some bondage.”

And then she tied me up. As she was tying me, she talked about the history of Japanese bondage in her lovely soothing voice. It was the start of an amazing time that featured rope and twine and clothespins and electricity and brain tweaking.

The second time I came to visit Mitsu, she suspended me. It can take a while to get all rigged up, but I love that time. I like the small commands “put your hands up” “give me your arm,” I like the closeness to her lovely figure, and I like her concern for my safety and well being. Then there’s the whole aesthetic angle — well-done ropework looks cool. And it leaves nice marks:

 

Rope Hickeys

That photo was taken by Head Mistress Sade after I shot my first video with Mitsu. That was a monumental day for me and I’m glad to have this picture. Mitsu had tied me in a lot of rope and it was taking a long time to un-do. She had to run to another appointment so Sade kindly stepped in to finish setting me free.

That video session really threw my mind into a spin. I was suspended face-down for a good long time while Mitsu turned me  into her windchime by attaching stuff to my body, including hanging my big black boots off my cock. I remember the moment I slid fully into subspace — I thought to myself “Elvis has left the building…” as I relaxed into the sensations.

Our next Play Date draws near and Mitsu has been posting about speed bondage and face bondage and all the stuff she learned at TES Fest. I have a hunch I might have a rope hickey or two next week at this time.

Gone Shopping

I just spent a fine afternoon having random fun around the New York City. I love this  place.

I took a stroll through Soho, past all the ultra-fancy lingerie shops and high-end boutiques. The streets today are filled with equally sexy shoppers. Well, SOME super-sexy shoppers. Mostly it’s just people. Even my destination Toys in Babeland was crowded today. I proudly marched straight to the dildo section in the back of the store and sized up the options. I settled on the Jane Doe:

My New Dildo

Those are my cock rings on my new toy. The ring at the base is 1.5″, which I usually wear behind my scrotum; the ring at the top is 1.25″ and I wear that one in front. And just so everyone has a clear understanding of the size:

Jane Doe with Ruler

If I want Miss Mitsu’s fist up my ass, I need to get to work. This isn’t huge, but it’s a step up from the tiny thing I had before. This color is the closest to green they had — I know Mitsu likes green. It also goes well with my clothespins, which are multi-colored. So that’s nice.

Speaking of clothespins, I revealed their true use to my girlfriend this past weekend. I keep them in a little Japanese dish next to my bed. My girl was facedown on the bed, naked, and I was massaging her shoulders and back in preparation for intercourse. Her head was near my dish and she said “Hey, you haven’t done anything with your little clothespins yet.” To which I replied “Yes I have, let me show you.”

When I leaned over and picked up two of them, she yelped a little bit. I told her “don’t worry, they’re not going on you” as I attached one to each nipple. I believe her response was “that’s not right, you take those off” to which I replied “ok, but it is right. Just so you know.”

I feel pretty good about that exchange. I made an unmistakable demonstration of my  kink, but didn’t let her reaction throw me at all. We carried on and had a pleasant time. I’m contemplating showing her my new toy, though it won’t come up in conversation quite so naturally. I guess I could leave it in the little Japanese dish next to my bed…

I have seen darker days

In my last post I referred to the “dark pre-Mitsu days” and I’ve been thinking about that time a lot lately. Specifically, I’m thinking about my upcoming week of bachelorhood — my girlfriend is going to visit California for a week and I will be on my own in the city. I’ve been thinking of all kinds of mischief I can get up to while she’s away as well as issues of isolation and self-destruction.

When she would leave town in the past I would fill my head with all sorts of kinky plans and self-indulgent fantasies. I would scan the internet for information about kinky parties or club nights or whatever. I would browse S&M listings and contemplate scheduling a session with a Pro. I would search alt.com for hours hoping to find someone to be naughty with.

And 99% of the time I would end up drunk, alone, and miserable in my apartment. There’s a lyric in one of my favorite songs that comes to mind:

I feel trapped by mutual affection

and I don’t know how to use freedom

I dearly love my girlfriend, but I’ve also had this wad of desires for so very long. It took a long long time for me to get to where I am today, and it’s a hell of a thing to look back on the darker days from this new perspective.

In the past, I would spend the two weeks before my girlfriend’s departure combing the web for every fetish event in the tri-state area. Even when I was lucky enough for an event like SMACK or Byte to fall during one of her trips it never worked out. I would masturbate myself into an absolute phrenzy of anticipation. I would dress up in my latex, play with some toys, snap some auto-erotic photos, and disappear into the world of internet porn. Then I would chicken out and not go. Sometimes I would sabotage myself with booze — end up soused by 9:30/10:00 and realize I was in no condition to leave the house.

I did manage to get out to a couple of events. Once I attended an open house at Nutcracker. That was one of the better adventures, but I didn’t get so far as booking a session. There were some very hot and friendly dommes there — I don’t remember any names, this was probably 6 years ago or more — but I ended up leaving before too long. One moment that sticks in my mind is when I was sitting near this woman (someone who worked in the dungeon but wasn’t a domme) talking about Hedda Lettuce. I made some gesture or comment that indicated I knew who Hedda Lettuce was and this woman was amazed and asked me directly — “You know who Hedda Lettuce is?”

Then it struck me that what I found uncomfortable about this open house was the vibe I got from the other potential clients. In my mind, if you’re interested in S&M some familiarity with the great drag queens of New York is a natural fit. This little exchange just pointed out to me that such an attitude might be an exception among the clientele. I also didn’t really know what a session would be like since I had never worked up the nerve to try. I’m sure I went home and had a few beers and beat off in my latex underpants. 

That’s not so dark; that was definitely a step in the right direction. The dark days were the times I ended up at sleazy strip clubs, drunk off my ass and throwing money down the toilet. I don’t even want to think about those times.

I want to think about how far I have come. I sometimes fear that I sound like a commercial for Rapture, but I would not be where I am with my kink if it weren’t for that place. I found them about 18 months ago, but I didn’t really pay close attention to the site until last November. I was determined that the next time my girl left town I would not fall into the same debauchery again. I carefully read all the domme profiles then picked up the phone and booked a session with Mitsu. 

I came close to chickening out once again, but something made me climb those stairs and I have never regretted it. Today as I think about the mischief I’ll get up to when my girlfriend is away, it makes me really happy to know it won’t involve waking up with a profound hangover and bitter remorse. Rapture is so much safer than the Hustler Club or some stranger’s apartment. “A safe place to do dangerous things” is my favorite description of that place.

So yet another giant THANK YOU to Miss Mitsu and all the lovelies — including the behind the scenes lovelies — of Rapture.

I’ll be seeing you soon.