It’s not even 10pm and I am about ready to pass out.  My entire body aches, my finger is out of its splint tape simply because I don’t have enough brain power to reapply it.  My butt itches from tons of little tiny scratches.  My forehead is tender, my side is tender, parts of my scalp.  There are bruises already on my shins and many more that are still forming.  I can’t seem to drink enough Gatorade to catch up with the dehydration and sore throat from screaming too much and smoking too many cigarettes. We had an amazing night.

The energy at the party was fantastic.  While we waited for my domination scene we saw a beautiful knife play scene.  I’ve never seen a submissive giggle so much while being poked with sharps.  Our first scene was great, and I’m feeling competent with caning at this point.  Towards the end of our scene our close friends were getting started across the dungeon.  For awhile my partner and my friend were screaming in sync, it was really nice.

We of course had to fight, it is the basis of our entire relationship.   It took a little doing to clear enough space on the dungeon floor.  Though after the first few slaps, grabs, and kicks we had all the space we needed.  The highlights of the first fight scene was me being dragged around the carpet in circles by my ankles with him yelling, “How about that rug burn?”  Can’t tell you how many other people asked me that question as the evening progressed.  Our first scene ended after my head was shoved in a trashcan.  It was beautiful energy and ending on a humiliation point just made it.

Since my top was off, and difficult to retie, I decided to do a duct tape bustier.  Somehow we got the wrapping done while I was smoking a cigarette in the garage.  We toured the party engaging in some good conversation, but by the time we made it back to the dungeon area we were ready to go again.  This time the duct tape was the target.  We struggled, he tried to grab me up and I’d throw my weight so that he couldn’t lift me.  I was screaming, and insults were flying through the air, until he finally managed to grab me by the tape on my back.  I ended up hovering above the ground by my duct tape bustier as I struggled to get free and he was trying to rip it open.

The tape finally gave out and I went straight down, landing in perfect break-fall upright in fetal position with a loud thud and fits of laughter.  I felt the impact through my whole body, but it didn’t stop the cackling.  He had trouble ripping the tape off through my laughing more than me putting up any sort of fight.  Though as the tape really started coming off this largely switched to screaming.  By the end I’m back to kicking and fighting dirty as usual.  Though he gets the roll of tape, and preps to start binding me with it.

Amidst clawing, kicking, slapping, struggling, insults, screaming and writhing I end up with my fingers taped shut.  During this part I start cursing about how he stole that trick from a story I had told him about a prior scene.  Taped my arms together, somewhat unsuccessfully taped my eyes and mouth closed.  My hair got involved as well, this consent was so amusingly obtained while in roll.  He said your hair is going to end up in the tape if you don’t move it out of the way, and I continued to curse and say I didn’t give a shit.

Due to the large amount of struggling, ripped tape, and other mayhem in this part of the scene my right pointer finger got badly jammed and sprained during the taping.  We both saw the finger as a warning sign, but both consented to ignoring it.  It has been a point of hilarity throughout the day today as I can’t do things like open cereal boxes and have spent most of the day with a mutant double finger, since I chose the cheapest splint option available: paper tape and my middle finger.

I get tortured a bit while bound and am given enough air to get out of the tape in-between long blood curdling screams.  After getting out of it we start fighting again.  I start hitting him with the ripped off tape, and he picks up our rattan cane.  Due to the scuffling and confusion we actually switched weapons several times.  Eventually we’re both so overtaken with the sting, and so tired, we came to a truce.

A little bit later the dungeon mostly cleared out, and we had a quiet scene with me subbing for the “paint roller of doom”, a paint roller covered in carpet nails.  It was nice being in good ole subspace for a bit.  I had missed the lovely floaty nature of it all these past few months.

It was a great time even through the commute home.  We stopped at a Starbucks and enjoyed ridiculous fast food cafe drinks sitting outside as the sun rose.  After a four hour nap we went out to get burritos in the inner harbor and were amused at how we are tourists in the city’s tourist trap.  As we had difficulty finding parking and the restaurant.  We came home and napped while watching Fight Club.  Can’t think of a better way to have spent the weekend.

We both remain continually in awe of how we grow together, and how fun our lives remain.  The intensity and seamlessness of our scenes gets better every time.  A physical measure of our work on communication, and our personal soul searching.  We remain amazed at the response we often get from the community.  We’ve heard a lot of neat things about what others get out of our play, and we look forward to many more fights in the future.

A year ago today it was raining, just like it is right now.  It rained like this for days, Baltimore wringing the sweat of summer out of the sky.  A year ago today I got offered the job I have now.  Over this weekend I’d end up attending my first formal play party, and begin making this website what it is now.  If I needed a new birthday today would make a good one.

This stretch of time in the calendar year for me is like the weakening of the veil.  I see myself without the barriers of my ego.  This trend has been repetative throughout my life.  I can’t think of a tail end of August that did not have this moment.  Observed mostly in silence, in a thoughtless way, absorbing directly into the deepest parts of who I am.

It has also been a time of major change, it makes sense given that for many years this marked the beginning of school.  I also have this uncanny ability of pair my modal shifts, preferring to change everything at once.

A year into BDSM community, and I couldn’t even begin to explain how I got to where I am now.  Last night my friends and I were nodding off on the couch watching hojojutsu demonstrations.  This was after purposefully setting the floor on fire with my new torches.  The night before I had an unofficial meeting with the rape squad during happy hour.

There is a party tomorrow, and I don’t need to think hard on what I’m wearing or what’s going in the bag.  My new comfort level with dominating/topping bewilders me, and I simultaneously feel like I know nothing on the subject.  My boyfriend’s butt is still a little green from the party last week, and I can’t remember the last time I didn’t have at least one bruise or scratch on my body.

Meanwhile, I still get to work on time.

The path was made up of so many tiny moments.  I can’t pick any single one out and name it most important, truly all of them were.  I can’t quantify the individual lessons learned. I simply know I know a hell of a lot more than I did a year ago, and a year from now it will be even more.

I am simultaneously thankful that the weather doesn’t change, because there are many moments when I think the only thing that has remained the same is summer ending rains.

On the weekends I don’t tend to shower.  I sit in my hot and humid studio with one fan on.  I spend a lot of time meditating, naked, reading, and contemplating.  My hair knots and dreads, it’s a process I very much enjoy.   When I run out of cigarettes I rummage through my drawers and put on a mismatch of wrinkled clothes, and put on my bandanna.  I walk quietly out the door, thinking all the way there and back.

This is a pervasive portrait of me, I have been this way for half my life.  Different forces such as school, past relationships, communities and friends have attempted to shift it.  Though I always return here.  Everywhere I’ve ever lived, every stage of my life this has been a sacred part of me.

It’s funny that such a constant identifying feature is so mundane.  It’s a simple ritual that signifies the use of my spare time.  I can view my entire life through the contents of this ritual at different points in time.  From long walks through the suburbs to the gas station when I was a teenager living with my parents.  To the High’s down the street from my first apartment, to the convenience store in the place I hated but was wedded to, to walking through the park in the center of the city back to my apartment.

The clothes change, as does the length of my hair, the symphony of topics in my mind changes in its section, its melody shifts and grows, though for years it’s been the same.  I still practice dance, though now without clothes.  I follow the same sense of spirit, though with a new depth to my meditations.  I still wax and wan to the same moon, I still shift my habits with the season.  For all of me that moves through growth and change, is all of me that remains the same.

It’s a needed comfort in my life, which has been rocketing forward for the past 18 months.  Some mornings I wake up and wonder if I will recognize myself.  I shift through so many modes, so quickly, in so few days.  In the past two weeks I’ve been raped by my friends, have found a new sense of professionalism at work, played flute and fire in the woods with hippies, been strung up with rope, conducted pagan rituals, gone to the beach, and beaten my partner.  Each an act that was wholly mine, each requiring a different state of mind.

My life is one of such continual exposure I often wonder if I’ll ever get a chance to process, I sometimes feel drowned in its riptide.  Though I never stop being thankful and I never want it to stop.  With all the lessons I learn, in all the directions I grow there will always be that portrait, I will never stop being her.

My third eye, which could also be phrased as my imaginative consciousness, gateway to astral and higher consciousness has never been particularly good.  It is actually often at the point where I rarely remember dreams, and where I get the sense in the morning that I didn’t dream at all.  In my youth I was avid about opening my inner eye, and made quite a bit of progress.  Since I’ve been away from my practice for several years, it’s gotten all rusty again.

It’s always been a point of frustration for me, though it hasn’t kept me totally from powerful trance and energy work.  When my Ajna is open, even when the sight is blurry or shadowed, it only serves to amplify my other work.

Along with regular meditation on chakra opening, I am working to understand the pervasive injury to my imaginative mind.  I know a lot is rooted in psychological trauma, and that when my eye has been open I lay very prone to terrible vivid nightmares, or vivid flashbacks.  My last time around with third eye wakefulness was in 2007 when I began to realize my life was not in order.  The dreams and visions hounded me until I made major changes.

While my mind has difficulty with colorful imagined fantasy, I have no problem with being present focus.  A series of internal driven meditations I do connect well with self examination to archetyes, seeing the connections between people, sensing essence, and it’s flow throughout life.  I guess combined with the at times terrible force of imagination it makes sense to feel a little overwhelmed.

Perhaps I fear another shaking of my world, though I honestly doubt that, not in terms of anything around me that really matters.  The only life change I fear at this time is one of daytime careers.  The internal change though, the tearing of walls, and the terror stowed behind them, is a different story.  Life without some of those trappings, even if it is a life improved is yet another.

The answer of what to sacrifice at first harvest was fear, and I have no doubt that this is going to be a journey.

I was introduced to Oni by a good friend of mine at the last TNG party.  After some discussion on torture poses, photography, and thoughts on suspension he offered to tie me then and there.  We planned a follow up 1 to 1 session for this past Monday, and will hopefully be meeting up again sometime in September.  It’s been a great gift to be able to be in his ropes twice, and these shots are an echo of his portfolio at Lifestyle Images .

I got to hear some of his plans for future photography and suspension endeavors, keep an eye out as I’m certain the results will be worthwhile.

My family booked a week at the beach and my partner and I managed to arrange two full days to go join them.  Packing on Wednesday morning was an amusing experience as I realized I had no need to throw any lingerie or toys into my bag.  Of course the entire car ride consisted of wondering who was going to show up to happy hour that night, polyamory theory, discussing ways we want to play, and fetlife gossip.  We wondered how many small slips we’d make in front of my family as I have ceased to be vanilla anywhere outside of work.

As we arrived it began to rain, we took walks around the building talking kink, and I sat in the living room with my family chatting and editing suspension pictures.  When the rain stopped we went into our room, and the real trouble began.  He had gone into the bathroom to change and I was in the middle of putting my bathing suit on when he came back in the room and started rubbing cold wet hands on me.  I of course fall over squealing.

We get out on the beach and are on relatively good behavior until we get in the water.  There were several drowning attempts, and the beginning of a game of gross out chicken splashing around in the water attempting to make the most disgusting seductive poses possible.  A strange game of power exchange since the person dominating the moment is humiliating themselves, the control came from turning on the other while being as gross as humanly possible.

The heckling, threatening, insulting, assaulting talk of course was endless, and simply took a different form in front of my family.  Curt “pleases and thank yous” in front of my parents and vague references to kink.  My family starts to talk about going down to the boardwalk, I see if they can wait up for us.  Before we head out for a quick stroll on the beach he calls me a whore a little too loud.   We decide to tell my family to go on ahead to the boardwalk and we will catch up with them later.

When we felt the coast was clear we headed back to the condo, took a shower, and it was game on.  He’s been on me to top for a few weeks, and I had been working with him on headspaces.  A little pinching showed a lot of subbiness, and I regretted leaving the impact toys at home.  We had a good scene of spanking techniques instead.  I alternated between sting and thud hits, shaking him out of space with the occasional pinch.

All I could hear was screaming and smacking, and I worried for a moment about the thickness of the walls.  When we were done it had started raining again.  His hazy moaning evaporated into thick insults about me not wanting to go to the boardwalk in the rain.  We started watching an incredibly bad movie on the TV, and my family started to arrive back home seeking shelter from the rain.  The downpour turned to a drizzle, so we decided to venture out.

After about 10 blocks it started to downpour, we made our way back sopping wet.  As soon as we got dry we fell fast asleep.

In the morning we got up and walked back to the car to get some vegan friendly groceries and coffee.  The morning was about a vanilla as we ever get, though while getting ready to go back out on the beach there was molasses thick sarcasm.  We sat with my family for awhile on the beach and then we went for a walk.  I made sure to bring things with me that were hard limits for getting wet.

After arguing and sloshing through tide pools for awhile we stop.  I say I know he wants to throw me in the water, he notes I have a cigarette and other items that can’t get wet, that I probably planned it.  I grin a bit.

Back in our chairs laying in the sun and sand my family has decided to go back inside.  We proceed to feed the seagulls.  Getting a whole flock to surround out chairs.  Our good behavior continues to deteriorate.  It devolves into taking disturbing photos, leaving people on the beach wondering why that hot girl is rolling around in wet sand looking gross and someone is taking pictures of it.

We fly a kite, go inside, and slowly pack up and ready to leave.  Uneventful, polite, and no one seemed phased by us a bit.

It was a good vacation.

This will amount to snippets of life and a few vague notes.  It is odd to be honest with that when I sit down at the keyboard.  So much of gaining skill is recognizing when it isn’t with you.  At the moment I don’t have the ability to turn these ideas into one cohesive whole, I simply know that they are one.

I never used to write journals.  Since I’ve had a website I’ve had a journal on it, though it was usually just a bunch of nonsense.  Back in high school and college it was how my friends figured out what I was up to.  My life has always been expansive, carrying me from the depths of one mindset to the heights of another.  I simply wrote my day to day going ons as a means of venting and bridging the gap between the people on either side.

I started out, and still am, a poet, though recently it hasn’t felt like that.  The past few weeks I’ve felt those muscles twitch on more than one occasion.  Splinters of images, metaphors, and themes.  They come together like jigsaw puzzles with a handful of pieces missing.  The most frustrating thing about creation is waiting for something to grow.  Even aging makes me a poor student in patience.

With that I’ve been getting back to my meditation/trance studies.  Delving back to rummaging through the collective unconscious.  I go under seeking dark mirrors, attempting to glimpse my reflection.  I think I strive so hard to see myself, in all aspects of life, because I need to study the image to gain any sense of who I am.  As every glimpse is different and every day I change.  It’s a final answer that I can only gain through death or atrophy.

Recently change has gone forward without cause.  I haven’t even had a moment to study.  I at times wander through the day wondering who I am now, what is the same, what has changed.  It isn’t just the passing of time, it’s making continual and conscious change.  It has become my steady state, and I have yet to learn how to observe motion.

As always I had grander plans when shooting this afternoon, but in the end did the work I really needed to do.  Here are some facial expressions with the eyes focused away from the camera.  I had fun doing these, I hope you enjoy looking at them.

Though I finally have some basic lighting in my studio, so hopefully I’ll be up to more photogenic mischief soon.

Last night was lovely. We went grocery shopping after my partner returned from work, our evening included a trip to Wal-mart to buy a $25 grill, and nearly knocking over an aisle display in a tong fight. That day I had completed a thought provoking ritual, and my period had started. I fell asleep nursing my cramps and thinking deep thoughts.

I woke suddenly to the sound of the front door slamming and dark figures shuffling into the living room. A hood went over my head. My first cohesive thought was, “the rape squad is here”. Followed by me listening intently for voices, and realizing I’d really be screwed if I was wrong. Though soon people starting talking and ordering, and it was clear what was going on.

Several people at happy hour approached me saying they knew I would put up a fight! Thing is, I ain’t crazy. I fumbled around blind assisting in getting my clothes off. My partner had been pulled off the bed as a “ruse”. The futon mattress was flipping back (due to heat and need of a new bed we are sleeping in the living room). I heard a tarp go down, and felt myself being lifted up, slammed down and tied to the frame.

I knew when I signed up, there was going to be nothing nice about this. Great thing I know there is next to nothing nice to getting my period as well. I was actually thrilled that my body was assisting in making this an even more depraved experience.

The squad had found it very amusing that I was allergic to cucumbers. So I was immediately being tortured with the next closest thing, zucchini. There was clothespins, caning, strap-ons, wax, ice, popsicles, crops, biting, corn, and knives all thrown at me in the span of maybe 20 minutes. At one point I was fairly convinced someone had peed on me only to find out later it was just warm water.

I would articulate more, except after a bit it all blurs. Which is of course why I do this, I love throwing my mind into override. Still being aware, but having no chance to really think or even comprehend anything that is going on.

Finally the clothespins just became too much, and my poor little, freshly awoken brain had just had too much. I called safeword and leapt in the shower. The squad quickly dispersed to go back home and get some more sleep. I was gifted the cane, and we decided to use our early arousal as an excuse to go to a dirt mall where I bought a new toy.

KUDOS to the squad!