Pondering Wax...

This is a free write vent... read, or not, as suits your fancy.  It’s just a ramble where I’ll let the world stand for my confessor.

At the moment I’m looking at a bottle of whiskey.  It’s good whiskey, my whiskey, I earned it.  But I haven’t opened it, the wax seal is still intact.  If you know your whiskeys you know what kind it is, but that’s no big deal.  It’s whiskey, and good whiskey.  But that’s not why I’m staring at the bottle. I’m staring at the bottle wondering if it’s wise to open it yet. 

You see, I earned the whiskey scrubbing down a kitchen prior to turning in a set of keys.  Now I am NOT someone who gets a cheap thrill out of working sponge mops and oven cleaner and buckets of pine-sol solution, nope, not even if my helper is a sweet thing wearing a tiny little French maid outfit with no panties and a cut-away corset top where she has to be careful not to get her nipples in the suds, which she most definitely was not. Sorry... no French maid outfits in this story.  Nope, scrubbing kitchens is not enjoyable work. I’m sure somewhere in that ever more massive lexicon of kink the fetish folk maintain there’s some fancy acronym for them who feel differently, but that ain’t me.  Scrubbing kitchens is just a chore needs doing from time to time, and since the gal whose chore it was by rights was scared of the job semi-chivalrous dinosaur that I am I volunteered to work mercenary for a bottle of whiskey.  I figured what the whale, if I don’t drink any more whiskey than what I can earn in barter scrubbing kitchens I’m damn sure not going to hurt myself. 

But if I’m honest about the whole affair there was more in play than just that bottle (which was simply the first thing to pop to mind when I realized I had to ask for something lest QB, the lady who needed the help, conclude I am  host and home to some sort of domestic fetish, opening the possibility of her starting rumors to that effect which allowing for the fact there’s a couple of gals who’d really, really like to get their hands on me might end up with me owning season tickets for this years theater of the absurd.  No thanks, not this year sweetheart.  Maybe next year, but not this year).

As close to Omega as I'll ever post

You see, at one time the kitchen in question was Omega’s.  The little pad has changed hands at least once since then, finally ending up with the keys in the possession of QB, the woman who is, or at least was, as close to the HFFIC of Omega’s circle of lifestyle folks as is ever formally defined.  But a set of wandering keys didn’t change anything, for me going back in there was like that line in Leonard Cohen’s great song Hallelujah, you know “...baby I been here before, I know this room, I’ve walked this floor...”  Some of the more intense hours of my life went down in there, I’ve got memories six axle heavy tied to that little pad and the lady who used to live there.  Never got tied down to a kitchen chair, still have my hair, but... yea, and definitely hallelujah, or close enough for me.

Which is why now I’m starting to wonder if I had more motive in volunteering to help “clean it up” than what I was admitting to myself in the moment.  Clean it up, call it done and forget it. Makes me wonder if someone is trying to help me renig and resign my resolve.  I’ve asked the bottle of whiskey that question, but like most bottles of whiskey it’s refusing to say a word unless I open it, and that’s part of the problem with whiskey.  It really, really wants to get drunk, get someone drunk, and you really can’t trust a damn thing it says because it will say anything to further its’ ambition.  Sorry Mr. Whiskey bottle, but I’ve known you for to damn long to let you get away with that one.  Bottle, did you come my way hoping to help me forget what I swore I would not forget no matter how uncomfortable remembering the truth of what I learned might be? 

Those who’ve followed my ramblings know that for me the Omega affair was a catalytic event, an epiphany event, one of those chance encounters that end up redefining some major part of your life.  In her own way she impacted my life as much as my muse Alex, and unlike Alex who was safely half way around the globe it was worl up close and extremely personal, intimate personal in some ways closer than any woman before her.  Her honesty about her involvement with the bdsm community blew the last latches on the repressed memories concerning that world’s impact on my life that had been a major mystery, and a major bane, on my life for all of my life.  She  provided the final critical pieces of understanding for me concerning a great deal, a very great deal, of my history.  In the beginning I sheltered her sanity, in the end she sheltered mine.  It was quite a ride let me tell you. 

Omega and I have seen each other a few times in the last few weeks, necessary contact while she was back in town winding up her affairs in this part of the world, treating each other with every social protocol in the book welded down solid to the deck and cross bolt braced just for good measure.  No problems, just that distance protocols produce.  I still carry a love for her, probably always will.  No issue, I was ready for that, just the inevitable bittersweet end of what simply couldn’t continue on as was for everyone’s sake.  But I wasn’t ready for what QB brought to focus after Omega pulled out headed for what’s home for her now, and that’s what I and the whiskey bottle have been discussing for a while now.

The upshot of the whole affair is that I am resolved to work some justice on the bdsm  community for what they did to my life, to the lives of my family, justice in the form of totally disabling their ability to do the same to anyone else (since all but one of the villains involved in damaging my life is dead of old age by now, I can’t get to those personally responsible... if I could I’d shoot ‘em and smile to watch ‘em die, but I can’t).  As far as I’m concerned there is a state of war between myself and the realms of bdsm.  It would be so much simpler if it was the kind of war where body count and gross destruction were the only factors in play.  That would almost be fun. 

But it can’t be that kind of war and be a righteous war, it can’t, that’s how the bottle of whiskey entered the picture.  I knew full well QB’s status, but she’s done me no wrong, she did very right by Omega, was a true friend to her, no reason to carry a grudge at the personal level against those innocent of causing what damaged my life.  My fight is with the ideas and ideals, not those who live with any degree of honor within those structures.

In the months since Omega and I quit keeping close company I’ve kept my eyes open, been watching several people I’m fairly sure are in the lifestyle, more than watching them I’ve been engaging them in conversation, getting to know them, their lives, their choices and the reasons for those choices.  The more I’ve learned the more delicate an issue targeting becomes, and talking to QB while we worked brought the issue into tight focus. 

There are some I find I do have respect for, and that’s what’s got me talking to unopened bottles of whiskey.  Easy to hate the punks, not so easy to dismiss the humanity from someone who suffers chronic pain and appears to be fighting fire with fire, enduring masochism as a learned trait so the brutalities of bdsm can used like a back burn fighting some forest fire fate put on their life they can’t be free of.  A decidedly dicey call, how to handle that in an ethical manner.  If it buys them any relief at all then it’s a therapy of choice, god awful sad, but still, a valid choice. 

And yet such choices are what entice and enables the (usually hypochondriac... go figure!) assholes into the picture to seduce who can say how many more who have no such need, those who will in the end suffer far deeper injury to their life than the injury a properly swung flogger might inflict on the skin on their back or butt that will heal up nicely in fairly short order.  All to often I’m afraid the... recreations... they indulge in are actually, as such things were in the old sailing navies of the world, set to block back some prohibited thought from the recipient’s waking thought, like perhaps any thought that might allow them to perceive just what kind of emotional parasite has made a saddle mount out of their life. In other words, the kind who end up doing to others what was done to me and mine, the ones that appear by the red light of utter rage in the targeting cross-hairs when that soul deep anger that’s still encapsulated inside me makes an appearance.

The ones I call enemy are the ones who are so slimy, so sinister gross, that just popping them between the eyes with a round of hollow point would really be to good for them.  They shouldn’t get off so easy, the wanna-be masters who are nothing but arrogant cowardly punks assuming pleasure from  someone else’s pain, the kind who hunt among the confused children with the intent of seducing them into formalized misery as a fashionable alternative to resolving their confusion and achieving adulthood, the kind who will enslave and abuse someone else’s life so they themselves can stay infantile incompetent, and of course their opposites on the masochistic side, those who imbibe physical pain as pleasure only to use that pain as justification for the emotional turmoil they inflict on those around them, the sadistic pleasure they seem to take from manipulating the misplaced guilt and sympathy they invoke with the pathos of their recreations, damage to innocent lives that heals far slower than a flogging if it heals at all.  I’ve got no sympathy for their kind.  The devil can turn the whole damn lot of ‘em into dog food for all I care.

But telling which is what is not an easy call to make in the heat of combat, not when the objective is to fight a righteous war, not when there are no second chances to correct an error.  That’s the conflict that’s been sucking me down for a week or so now.  I’m not going to change my mind, and I really don’t want to put undeserved misery on anyone if I can help it.  That’s just helping the enemies cause.

This one is going to take some serious thinking.  There’s a few options on the horizon that might be configurable to be discriminating, their impact inversely proportional to the honor and ethic of the target such that the vile suffer and the honorable don’t, but weapons of that sort are hard to craft, hard to tune.  They’re... interesting thoughts, to say the least.  If they could be pulled off it would be major sweet, but getting them in play?  Devil’s in the details, gotta love a challenge. Paul Mu’ad Dib and his Bene Gesserit mother Jessica would appreciate the subtlety, that’s all I’m gonna say about ‘em.  So fuck it, it’s just whiskey, and I want a drink.  This is going to be an issue even after the whiskey is gone and it’s just a bottle, so why not.  In vino veritas... and once more into the breach... cheers.