By The Numbers...

There's a passage in the Bible came to mind the other day.  It sort of snuck in by a strange route, but still a valid thought.  I'm speaking of any of the several places where it says the sins of the parents will impact on the children for several generations.  As a kid I'd always thought "how unfair is that?" thinking it was God who would be putting the hit on the kids and grandkids.  A childish mistake, I didn't understand several things very well back then.  Like so many things in the good book the point of the thought wasn't what God would be doing, the thought was how mankind would respond in reaction to itself… those passages were given as a warning, not a threat.  The scripture popped to mind while thinking about the nature of my enemy bdsm.  Truth is I was wondering just how far away from perverted thought does a person have to be to be fully safe from the perversions.

Since next up is a reconnaissance to map the boundaries of the thought environment that produces the perversions (with the ultimate goal of totally destroying that line of supply) I was examining the issue in the same frame of mind I used to use dealing with hazardous chemicals... what kind of PPE is needed, what safeguards for self and surrounding environment.  I'm making ready to go into the contagious zones, the hot zones, to mount such a mission without absolute certainty of my own ethical integrity could easily end me a worse place than simply dead.  Of course 'how far away' really doesn't have much to do with physical distance or wind direction, and the safety gear required is in the form of immutable understandings that will penetrate even the most subtle of lies, but still, a valid analogy. 

At first I engaged a mode of thought drawn from the "six degrees of separation" theory.  A useful first thought, but not all that well suited to my needs.  A base assumption of the theory states it only holds true for "an unstructured network."  Well, the macroscopic society is anything but unstructured, when examined in the framework of the collective entities it is heavily structured.    Many of the groups that make up society are all but closed, only a minor percentage of their component individuals known between the factions. 

( For example I'd bet there are very few publicly known as primitive christians who are also publicly known as practitioners of bdsm.  There may be a few, there's always a few, but by and large I'd say the vast majority of those involved with both worlds would not be known as members of both worlds by the other members of either  world.  The base definitions of the respective collective entities are just not compatible enough to support a public dual allegiance.  The number of node individuals willing to publicly access both realms is actually very limited compared to the total population of the respective sets. )

I bounced the thought around for a while, and then realized I was still making the mistake of thinking simple spatial rather than the node and weighted edge system required to represent reality.  In reality the edges must be weighted according to the emotional compatibility of the collective entities hosted between any given pair of individuals.  The complexity becomes daunting in a great big hurry.  Just how far apart are we, one from the other, when society is examined under such a microscope?  And how far is far enough? How does one go about weighting such edges?  An interesting question.  A very, very interesting question when you need to take the answer into the field and put it to work where an error in the mode of thought just might turn out to be a soul killer if translated into reality.

As the saying goes: back to the drawing board.   And what did I find when I got there?  The wisdom from the good book, sitting patiently and waiting for me to understand the clue given.  The sins of the father... hmmm...

A Disclaimer of Tuition...

If…

Philosophy has any value beyond mental masturbation

Then…

the state of modern society is proof of the errors contained in the work of philosophers past, which is why I tend to avoid the study of philosophy: if I imbibe the thought of those who created the errors it is most likely I will internalize and repeat the same errors.  However if I rethink the entire system it is most likely I will not make the same errors as the thinkers of antiquity, and by the difference in our errors the advancement of mankind may then be accomplished.

The Saruman Factor...

My friend Omega did it to me again.  I don't know that she did it on purpose, but I'll never know for sure that she didn't.  She's very, very good, good the way only someone who feels as much as they think can be good at the art of saying exactly the right thing at the right time to open the appropriate door, the unmarked unremarkable door there half way to the end of a dark hallway of identical doors.  What did she say?  She said "you didn't have a clue babe, you had no clue at all."  Most generally that phrase is used as a put down, more than a bit condescending leaning towards intimidating.  It stung in my ears because she was right, I didn't have a clue.  And I'm having trouble forgiving myself a functional ignorance that very likely put me guilty of mishandling the events of my life to the detriment of everyone including myself, that in point of fact put sins on my soul that otherwise would not be there. 

There are risks to introspection, to retrospective self judgment, and I'm standing square in the middle of one of the largest of those risks: the tendency to judge one's actions of the then by the expanded knowledge of the now.  As memory presents it appears both my mother and my wife were deeply contaminated by entanglement with the bdsm mentality... a defining attitude towards life and love kept absolutely secret from me, an act my heart still feels as a totally malicious lie of omission.   I'd heard of such things of course, in a grocery store marketing sort of way, seen their porn (and went sheeeeit... those are some totally sick puppies, someone should bust a cap and put 'em out of everyone's misery), but as to the hints of the underlying pathology such people present in their day to day lives?  No.  No clue.  Probably the most damning fact of my life.

The questions before me now are my own actions in those days, how to judge the ethical status of my deeds.  How much should a man ask and expect of himself when dealing with those secretly motivated by a perverted form of thought?  How much responsibility for the consequences of their responses should a man accept onto himself? At what point should ignorance be disallowed as a justified defense? Perhaps the better question is it even possible to make such a judgment call working from forensic evidence?

It is a troublesome thing for me, now that I'm maneuvering to re-insert myself back into the circles called society.  One thing the last six months has brought crystal clear is my degree of ignorance concerning the inner make up of the residents of some of the more heavily spiced orbits I might wander into.  If my heart has one more go in it there's only one more, and I damn sure don't want to lose my last chance for love untainted.  How to acquire true boots on the ground tactical intel is gaining importance as an overriding priority, because if there is one thing I absolutely don't want it is to be deceived again.

Which puts an even more interesting conundrum on the stage, the Saruman factor it might be called: is it possible to know enough to avoid being deceived without that knowing becoming a contamination of equal perversion?

Genderless...

Just a tidbit of a thought today, but still, a thought worth taking a look at.  I was in conversation with my lady friend this morning when the thought arrived.  It came in riding one of those tangents that is a surest sign of true intimacy between two human beings.  We were discussing the things that stand between us, the things that limit the depth of our relationship, the things you simply must accept about them no matter how uncomfortable you might find them to be because they are part of your friends' deepest definition of self, the things you must respect to respect their internal fidelity of self that allows them to be a friend in the first place. 

Anyhow, the thought goes like this: the only time a human being can actually be free of the burden of gender is while they are making love to another human being of opposite gender.  Not simply sex for the sake of sex, the sensation of the mating, but making love head to head, heart to heart.  Only then, when she has taken him hilt deep in her belly and his breath is her breath, when they are motionless savoring the poignant delight of their auras of persona merged to balance without the effort of projecting that aura beyond the boundaries of the flesh, only then can a human being know an existence free from the burden of gender. 

Just a tidbit of a thought, expressed so many times in so many different ways it's all but trite, but still a deep thought touching so many facets of the human condition that is so very, very defined by the thousand and one ways people arrange their lives and loves trying to achieve those moments of tranquility that make the effort of genuine love worthwhile in the first place.

A Question Needing Answered

It is hard enough to lay the fallen to rest when the combat is righteous, a genuine defense of freedom.  It is almost impossible to do so when the blood of soldiers is used to feed the whores of commerce and national pride.  How long will it take before the politicians understand that while an army can suppress violence with a greater degree of more controlled violence an army really cannot make peace, because peace and lack of violence are not really the same thing?

Jackhammer and Drill...

I know an old cop who hates drugs, hates them with a passion.  In his world drugs are the headwaters for all the rivers of misery that flood the marshes of mankind, the sinkholes and quicksand bogs that consume lives.  He is certain if that river of drugs would dry up, or even just run a bit slower he could make it in and back out to help those he genuinely does have compassion for, the ones he spent a career watching suffer and die and spread despair.  And I'm not going to say he isn't right, at least to a degree.  It has to be hard for him to realize his efforts were at best stop gaps, that the law can never do more than deal on the symptoms of a problem because law can only act in response, always fighting on the defensive, never able to take the offensive towards victory.

In truth his enemy wasn't really the river of drugs, it's the wellspring thought that feeds the river of drugs: the idea that being intoxicated makes life a better place to be.  The river you can dam or divert, but so long as those springs are flowing you can't really win in the long run, sooner or later the pressure of those springs will cause what is being spewed to work its' way right under your very feet.  I only mention him to set perspective on an ambition of mine which is very much subject to the same conundrum, a problem where so far no one has been able to do more than treat symptoms. 

It is my resolve that what is known as the bdsm lifestyle should become a social non sequitur, a mode of thought fading from prominence to become null and void and ultimately forgotten.  The problem I, or anyone else for that matter, will always have with such an ambition is the fact an idea is almost impossible to kill.  To work devastation on any number of practitioners of some idea is no more difficult than the task of identifying them, a fairly simple matter of surveillance really.  Beyond that minor obstacle mankind has, sadly, made himself more than proficient in dealing death and despair one on the other.  But the practitioners of such things are like that river of drugs, they are not the driving force of the problem, they're most generally the victims of the problem: victims trapped like a weed rooted in the ethical cracks of a culture, so deep rooted and perennial the culture comes to accept the deformities as inevitable, and being inevitable therefore acceptable by default.

Well, if my intent was to have a weed free driveway it wouldn't be that big a deal now would it.  Just trot down to the local lawn and garden store, there's half a dozen poisons refined specifically for killing the roots growing in the cracks.  But my intent isn't a weed free driveway, my intent is a weed free society and contrary to the rumors there really isn't any single poison available for that job. It isn't like mankind hasn't tried to create such a concoction, far from it.  But every single one has presented the same problem: in the process of killing one kind of weed it turns out to fertilize two others.   Religion has failed, no form of law has really made a dent, social conventions corrupt out and fail almost as quickly as they're brought on line.  The deformities remain, and with the deformities an overall diminishment of societies' viability and, ultimately, survivability.

So... what hasn't been tried?  To stay in analogy what hasn't been tried is exposing the dirt under the driveway to the sunshine.  I say it's time to fire up the big compressors, get out the jackhammers and hammer drills and bust some concrete.  Those aren't that hard to come by, not really, pretty much any equipment rental outfit will have several of varying sizes.  What isn't so easily come by are the correct bits, not when what needs busted are the paradigms and double standards that get blended to form the poorly poured and crack prone concrete modern society suffers from.

That's where my head is going to be for a good while into the future, taking what I've learned in the last couple of months and applying it to the idea of busting out the cracks in my society, treating them just like I would any other crack in any other load bearing material... figuring out how to find the ends of the cracks so I can drill those ends and stop the spread, figuring out how to cut open the cracks so a deep repair can be made, and most importantly figuring out how to stabilize the subsurface pressures that produced the crack in the first place so the repaired material won't be subjected to a tenth the force of the original.   

That last is really the ultimate fix, stabilizing the subsurface forces that produced the cracks.  As long as there are cracks there's gonna be weeds, but if there's no cracks the weeds have to grow out in the open where they're easily dealt with and poisons aren't really needed.  I have a few ideas percolating that just might work.  And I kind of like the idea of a poison free society.  Kind of runs alongside the idea of shutting down that river of drugs to a tiny stream to small to really drown anybody in misery.  Overall just a better place to live, you know?

Bitchfest...

Originally published Nov 27 2011

There comes a point where you must speak the thoughts you deny any major access to the majority of your time, the ones you sequester and silence to the demand that if you can't say something nice say nothing at all. But... if those thoughts are not given a voice the result is they actually become more powerful, submerging to form alliances between themselves, alliances of malice powerful enough to do major damage.  Fair warning, what follows are some of the things where my feelings get hurt on a regular basis, the elements of my heartbreaks, my despairs.  These are the things you probably don't want to know about, about me, about a great many like me.  But they deserve a voice, because they are not without justification from certain perspectives.  Read on if you wish, but only if you're willing to expose yourself to the other side of the argument, those things that believe me are waiting for the final insult that will ignite them into action.

First on my list is the new category of crime, the so-called "hate crime."  If a gay gets himself killed his murder is now a thing of more import than if someone decides to kill me.  How does being gay make his life more valuable than mine?  How does his sterility render his life more worthy of societies protection?  Just how in the fuck is this supposed to work?  Congratulations, hetero world.  You just got demoted to second class status.  The law says so.

If you are a hetero man?  Congratulations, you just dropped another notch to third class status, at least according to the feminists of the world.  According to them you are a mindless animal, a brute born condemned by gender into a life of animal violence, your behavior preprogrammed by hormones beyond your limited mental faculties' ability to comprehend much less control.  After all, there are only two kinds of people in the world, and you are the wrong kind, you're male: heartless and cruel, callous and uncaring, not a sensitive or sympathetic bone in your body, you'd rather put cyanide on your cereal than feel any positive emotion, any touch of compassion or empathy or understanding.  You're a man, and men are evil.  Don't believe me?  Just ask them. 

Oh, and if you're a man who went to work to feed a family?  Take a bow my man, you're the lowest class of all.  You chose to labor your life away doing what needs done to keep things working.  You don't exist, don't you know that?  You're not the cause of anything. All those hours of sweat, all the hours of dedication to your craft?  Meaningless. You didn't provide the running water and the roads, you had nothing to do with climate controlled homes or the electricity that powers them.  The electronics and the antibiotics, the food and the fuel that farmed it? Catch a clue, all of those things are naturally occurring, didn't you know that?  You wasted your life, it's your own fault after all.  You could have chosen to become a perverted intellectual and wield the magic of circular opinion regurgitated that makes the crude migrate to the surface already distilled into gasoline and plastic bottles for the reverse osmosis water running in every river.  It's all magic after all, you never worked any magic, your life was just the sacrifice to appease the gods of technology. 

And you know bro, it's a good thing we're no class nobodies, our lives ignorable and expendable, because without us the gods might become angry and go back to demanding virgins to feed the volcano, and given the current shortage of virgins, hell, given the shortage of anything resembling wholesome innocence of any sort that would be a real problem.  Only the perversions matter, didn't you know that?  The queers and the kinks, the deformed and the defective, they're what make the world turn, not us.  Love your woman, love your children, labor your life through to provide for them?  Nah, all that means is we're too stupid to be of any consequence.  According to them we should be grateful the gods will still accept us for sacrifices. 

Yea, I know.  Kind of hard to believe.  But if you'd been where I was tonight it would be a lot easier.  If you'd sat like I did and listened to a group of flaming faggots and femi-nazi libber lesbians bashing men in general and their fathers in particular you'd understand why sometimes I really, really have to work to remind myself they're still the minority, that it's still worth the effort to keep them alive as a side effect of maintaining life for the wholesome. 

But every time I have to remind myself of that I have to wonder if sooner or later it might not be worthwhile anymore, I have to ask myself at what point might it be time to give them what they want, give them the whole fucking world to do with as they see fit.  Of course, I want to be totally fair to them, I want to give them the world just the way we got it.  So every time I have to remind myself their contempt really shouldn't matter all that much I spend down my anger refining my plans for how to reverse every single thing we men have done, how to make sure when they take over not one goddamn thing we gave them that they take for granted is still working.  Don't think there would be enough time to put the iron back in the rocks where we found it, but hey.  We can spot them that much.  After all, they'll only have one generation to work with before old age stamps humanities' passport "extinct."

Jade Arriving...

I first posted this a year and some ago, but for some reason it returned to my mind this morning.  Something about the absolute assumption so very many people from so very many walks of life seem to hold, the one about how everyone just can't help being a lust driven slave trapped between nature's instincts and societies perversions of those instincts I suppose. 

The world I'm coming to see resembles nothing so much in my eyes as a beaker full of different liquids, liquids that don't really blend with each other, things that don't really like each other at all, the layers floating one on the other according to the specific gravities involved while the interfaces between the layers bubble and boil as the incompatible things react against each other, the salts and other dead things falling out to coat the bottom of the glass with... well, with something.  For some reason I want to throw a stir bar in that beaker and shatter the layers into a high speed vortex.  Somehow it would seem better to go ahead and react it out and see what's likely going to be left of our society.  That is if the beaker doesn't shatter and blow whatever all over the inside of the hood.  Yea, I'm in a funky mood this morning.

With bitterness in my heart…

Today is Easter Sunday, a day of celebration for the Christian folk.  But I feel no celebration.  I did as I have for years, got up this morning and said "Welcome back boss.  Sorry it's the same fucked up mess you left."

That was this morning, but it is now evening and I can find little in my heart but bitterness, the sour sick taste of utter betrayal by three people a man should be able to trust: a mother, a wife, and a daughter.  At this moment all I can feel for any of them is nausea.  To think of them makes me want to puke.

They share two things in common.  Me, of course, that goes without saying.  They share me, and they share a common lie, a cruel lie of omission, a lie that negates, inverts, and makes a total mockery of any and every thing I ever offered or endured on their behalf. 

My mother.  An authority whore who gave me to her cult as a living sacrifice as penance for the sins she said I already knew.  What sins Mom?  I didn't have a clue, not then.  But now I do.  From all evidence on the table your sins were pretty fucking sick, it's looking more and more like you were in "the lifestyle" way back in the day, back in that decade when a sub was an underwater warship and slaves were the order of the day.  Yea, right.  Made it to the level of the down and outers and the up and comers in the Hollywood scene of the late forties, early fifties did you.  Was she good, the lesbian slut who was your door in?  I've seen her, I think.  Just a foggy vision, but still, a vision courtesy of a total sweetheart of a woman, a Russian model who accidentally hit a register that unlocked one of those memories you can't really recall when it was made, a memory that might not be your own.  One of those visions that make the hair on the back of your neck stand up and sends the adrenaline running like a river. Just like the time when I was like fourteen and you gave me the sleeping pill, and as you handed it to me I saw your countenance become Ra, the vulture faced god of the Egyptian people, their god of the dead.  Thanks, I did take note of the warning, I just didn't know what to do about it.  What did I do to you, besides have the bad luck to be your firstborn? 

Did you do to my father what my wife did to me?  Nah, Dad took a worse hit than I did.  He was a simpler man, a more innocent man than I, and yours would have been a blacker level of contamination than anything I've bumped into since.  Nah, you hit Dad a lot harder than Barb hit me.  It killed him in the end.  You thought I didn't know?  Oh yea, I kind of figured it out.  What was so terrible that his brother drove from Idaho to Southern California to spend three days walking and talking and then drive home?  Takes something pretty heavy to cause that.  Like finding out for sure where you'd been, what you'd done before you met him?  Like being twelve years into a marriage you believed was sealed for eternity before the truth came out?  Yea, that would do it.   Rest in peace Dad, you're not bound to a promise that was founded on a lie.

Barb didn't really lie, I really believe she didn't know.  Not until a decade of love and support had built her up enough she could begin dealing with her alter ego Miranda, the hate based buried personality that split off when she was gang raped at ten and her world did nothing for her.  Barb didn't lie, but Miranda damn sure did.  I look back now, and it is so easy to see when Barb and I made love, and when it was Miranda fucking me.  I think back on the things said by mutual friends from when we first met, and yea, that makes sense too.  Barb wouldn't have done those things, but Miranda when Barb was out of the game?  Yup.  Perfect fit.  It so totally explains the dichotomy in her, the contemplative woman of deep spirituality and the pain slut revenge queen waiting the chance to throw her deeds in the faces of the world that betrayed her into an existence she hated.  And me, caught in the middle, loving the one and suffering assault after assault from the other, assaults drawn from the most absolutely perverted forms of sadomasochism she could find as she tried to recruit me to her cause of destroying Barb so she could take over the day time hours.  Miranda would have recognized the taint left from my first encounter, of course she would, what Mom left loaded on my personality trying to make me a slave to her cult was directly from the same range of perversions.  I'm sorry Barb, I am so sorry.  I didn't catch on quick enough.

And the one I don't want to talk about, but I must.  The one who's betrayal was the most total of all.  All you had to do was tell me the truth once, just once, and it would have been different.  The other pieces would have clicked, at least in part.  I would have had enough facts to act from, to defend us all.  But you didn't.  Instead you took the road of ego and contempt, the road of arrogance and disdain.  You let Miranda mother you instead of trusting me enough to tell me the truth just once.  You slutted yourself out by the time you were ten, gone lesbian by fifteen, I have it confirmed you were in the bdsm community by the time you were twenty five, probably before.  And you just like Miranda turned your perversions on Barb, working her, tormenting her with what she almost knew while the slut whore bitch con artist you took for a Dom looked on and gave directions in how to get more money out of her so you could indulge her favorite pastime: tormenting the wait staff of any restaurant unlucky enough to have you two walk in their door.

You know, the day you came home from the hospital I was a happy man, so happy, a totally proud poppa.  I went to work carrying cigars.  And I saw my friend walk in with his face pale and streaked from tears.  I asked him why, and he told me he had a new baby at  home as well: heavy downs syndrome, many birth defects, little chance for a normal life.  I threw my cigars away, and went in the warehouse to weep.  But now?  Now I think maybe I shouldn't have wept, maybe he got the better end of the comparison.

I have a most definite grudge to settle with "the lifestyle" and their habit of lying by omission to those in the position of being hurt the most by the ignorance.  To know is bad, but at least knowing you can defend yourself, or walk away.  To not know is even worse.  It's a grudge, it may become a vendetta, I don't know.  I'd like to kill off say three thousand of them, go Roman scale revenge, and I could.  But... that would be Zoe Ann's and Miranda's and Amanda's ultimate victory.  They would have made me as low as they, and that's not going to happen.  I'll suicide out before that happens.

There, I've said it.  Yea, there's some heavy bitterness in my heart right now.  Terrible heavy.  Now... what to do about it?

Poly...

A Latin word meaning “many.”  In English it most commonly serves as a prefix: polyester, polyvinyl, polyamorous.  For the last couple of months it’s been a common visitor on the stage of my thoughts.  It should be no surprise I’m not thinking about various forms of manmade materials to craft clothing or a waterbed mattress, but I have been thinking a fair amount about the word polyamorous, setting a framework around the concept of “many loves” as the young folk mean the word.

As a consequence of this latest recon run into the world of the young folk I’ve bumped into several things that just flat never got mentioned when I was their age.  I’ve written a fair amount about one of them, the perceptions of self and society I’ve been navigating as a result of a head on collision with a major villain in my life, a story I’ve yet to tell in full.  But in the same time frame as a consequence of keeping company with the same set of people I’ve equally been exposed to their evolving replacement for conventional marriages, the concept of polyamory, and that’s had a fair amount of time on the stage as well.

Just to set a frame of reference: I’m solidly hetero monogamous, for me home has always been in the heart of one woman.  Perhaps I’m a simple man but I need no more than that.  But at the same time I’ve never hesitated to open that home if there was need, over the years it happened several times, sometimes someone from my side of the world, sometimes from the wife’s side.  So it’s fair to say I have lived in a relationship capable of hosting  love for more than one.  Then as now it isn’t an uncommon thing for me to hold an extended family in my heart, carry a concern for the happiness and welfare of folks I’ve never claimed on a tax form. 

But those were offerings of platonic love, the mechanisms of sex and sexuality not really players in the context.  There were moments of intimacy in the physical as transient support, but those were moments rather than long term arrangements matched against the live load of life which is what the kids are working on.  From what little I’ve been exposed to it would appear they’re starting over from a level even more simple than the tribe, it would seem they’ve gone all the way back to the primordial troop as is seen in the other great apes and rethinking the whole idea.  Fair enough, given the current deplorable state of marriage I won’t say it isn’t a needed thing.

There’s no doubt balancing more than two people into working relationship to replace monogamy is daunting task.  Starting from the background of witnessing the failures of  monogamy one of the largest challenges the kids are dealing with is actually defining the loadings on a relationship in order to attempt to apportion those loadings across a  polyamorous family.  Another and perhaps more personally difficult task thrust upon them by the failures of monogamy they’ve witnessed is separating the various facets and phases of  sexuality from the other life elements that in the end become the alloyed structure of a working family.

That’s where I play in the game, trying to help the kids I know with a bit of the long frame perspective one acquires after decades of living monogamous.  Washing the dishes is washing the dishes, cooking the dinner that got them dirty the same way.  Chores are chores.  Equally it falls out that one will from time to time be providing comfort and sanctuary for another, unlike monogamy in a poly family which one gives and who receives is a far more open question to be answered, the dynamics of dependence and denial wide open. 

No one enters a marriage really knowing what they're getting into, not if it is two people or ten, everyone comes in still carrying elements yet to achieve full maturity.  In monogamy it is easily seen that she will nurture him into his full maturity even as he is doing the same for her, but in a poly relationship again the various facets of that oh so critical work will be divided out among several people and need be coordinated in some manner that provides continuity to the effort. 

Poly is a great deal more complicated a state of affairs far beyond sleeping arrangements and household chores.  The poly kids have yet to realize the final stages of parenting are actually provided by ones' mate, when one takes not one but several mates the step-parent syndromes of blended families just follows from the family of childhood into the family of incipient adulthood. But if that's how they were raised perhaps that's the only way they can be comfortable completing the final stages of growth, so I'm not going to say much against it, just be alert for the pitfalls they might not understand. 

And of course when you add sex into the mix it just goes nucking futs since sex and sexuality will be influenced by any or all of those other facets of life as they come to maturity, the poly kids are at extreme risk to maintaining the familiar and comfortable (but ultimately counterproductive to the relationship) ways of their immaturity by dividing up some specific facet of that immaturity between several sex partners where the partners in essence defend the emo status quo to defend some private delight based thereon.  Unlike monogamy it isn't nearly so likely for one to understand of the other how their sexual responses reflect the state of their other responses into a lover's bed. Tough stuff to manage, the all to often hidden ways and means and motives of sex in a poly relationship.

The kids have their work cut out for them to make it all work.  But maybe that's what they want, something with enough challenge that if they can make it work they'll have something to point to with a bit of genuine pride well earned.  As I said, they are young of years even if old in too many matters related to enduring the pain of failed families.  So many of the things they really need to consider with a level head are found in the middle of personal minefields, frankly I’m impressed at the progress they’ve made.  I'm cheering for them, and doing what I can, what they'll allow.

Of course I'm also concerned for them, as always the predators are circling their efforts, and a great many of the predators aren't honest enough to operate fang and claw but rather are hunting with innuendo and misdirection targeting what the predators know full well are the points where the kids are most vulnerable.  Evil, like rust, never really sleeps.

A short short painting in prose...

It was a cotton candy kind of afternoon that followed them home, fluffy white clouds in a perfect blue sky, blue grass under bare feet, blue grass music in the park air, kites and balloons, giggles and grins.  If it hadn't been for the huge bouquet of balloons conspiring with an area rug that simply refused to lay flat the evening might not have turned out as delightful as the afternoon had been. But conspire they did, unlikely as it might seem. Coming in the door the balloons met the ceiling fan, and before all was said and done she'd tripped on the contrary rug, falling face first down  the back of the sofa with an audible "ooof!"

Before she'd caught her breath from laughing at herself his hands were on her, flipping her skirt up over her waist to leave a pair of shining white panties contrasted against the tan of his hands holding her hips.  He bent down, put a kiss on the small of her back, let it linger to savor the little shiver rippling away from the caress of his breath.  "Tell me no now or just wiggle your bottom," he said softly, his fingers flexing oh so slightly as her back began to arch.   The sofa only slid eight or ten inches across the polished hardwood floor before everything relaxed enough the old sofa could go back to simply squeaking in counterpoint, and no one really paid any attention at all to the balloons cuddling in all four corners of the room teasing the poor ceiling fan, who of course was still stuck in the very middle of the middle unable to do more than turn slow lazy circles trying to ignore what couldn't be touched.

Snippets and ReRuns…

A few juicy thoughts harvested from my comments into various forums on the web…

Is the current upswing, the current fad involving bdsm relationships actually a backlash, a resistance movement against another and equally irrational social convention I'll name The Cult of the Female Orgasm ?  If that is the case then the surrender of personal freedom, the humiliations and outright pain the women endure become an act of contrition in advance of conviction for knowing they can't meet an utterly impossible social demand. 

The cult of the female orgasm is actually another male imposed irrationality created in response to the success of the feminist movements.  Look at the media, it is simply saturated with the idea that so long as the woman is getting hers, so long as four nights a week she is foaming and writhing and sleeping endorphin stoned from a dozen grand mall orgasms the rest of the man's world will be just peachy keen.  The boss won't be an a-hole, the bank will always loan money, his team will always win etc etc ad nauseum.  Of course this is just as irrational as assuming if the woman suffers her life away in sexual frustration the same results will be seen.  She knows neither of those two extremes will produce such results, and is apologizing in advance of his disappointed understanding.

If it is accepted that genetics does play a role in mortal personality traits then the celibacy of the Roman Catholic church suddenly becomes an absolute black hole sucking down into oblivion the genetic patterns that encourage the very things Jesus worked to teach.  A man becomes a priest, a women becomes a nun.  Both were motivated to those callings because of a deep personal belief in being kind, giving aid and comfort and understanding to their fellow humans.  But regardless of their personal efforts towards those most noble of goals the celibacy of the organization they joined removes from the human race what might have been their genetic contribution towards a race, a species, where those genetic tendencies towards gentle people easily fit to civilized behavior were the majority, not the minority.  Step back a bit and look down the line of history, and ask yourself how much better the world might be now, today, if all of the children never born because of the ultimate hypocrisy of the Catholic church's stand on birth control had been allowed to enter mortality.  A fucking condom is nothing nada zip in terms of birth control compared to celibacy enforced as the price of loving God enough to spend your lifetime serving him.

It is not fair to promote career ambition onto women as something both desirable and socially denied due to gender without giving equal space to a warning as to the essentially predatory nature of ambition.  Ambition will always result in sacrifices, always, it is not a woman thing or a man thing it is the basic nature of the beast.  Every life choice open to ambition's influence will be used to facilitate the ambition's first goal of dominating every facet of the hosts life.  Spouse, children, friends, family, all will fall second to the ambition if the ambition gets its' way.  Ask the old men, the successful old men, about the cost of ambition.  If you look closely you might even see a tear or two.  It is an unjust thing to ask the women to support the wealth of society by bearing the burden of ambition, she already bears the burden of childbirth that nature will not allow to be shared even with her sisters, much less any man.  From a command perspective it is foolish to squander the strength of a woman on a job a man can do... no need to use a shotgun on a housefly.

Concerning rage... and BDSM

This post is somewhat of an extension of the post "Tactical: Vigilante and Succubus" where I spoke to the idea of memories manipulated to bias the emotional environment of a moment to favor evil's needs and intentions.  Such manipulations are a powerful weapon in the enemy's arsenal of things that create misery.  But powerful as that is there are other things equally if not more powerful, and rage is another of evil's favorites because rage is not well or widely understood.

Rage is not anger.  I want to say that square out right up front.  While the two states may present a common pattern to the outside they are actually quite different on the inside.  Anger is a rational response to an affront, an insult, a threat to something recent and current.  Anger is a thing of the current moment while rage is the sum of old angers never resolved that have condensed and crystallized under the compression of justice miscarried into a single discrete pattern of self sustaining thought bridging between the conscious and the sub-conscious mind. 

Give that a moments thought, consider the implications of one discrete pattern of thought bridging across what nature intends to be quite separate realms of existence.  Yes, to set it into analogy it does resemble a short circuit, and not even a short to ground where the mechanism stops functioning but rather a short between circuits where power flows out of sequence, and out of control.  In other words, a dangerous state of affairs for the individual and all those around that individual.

I must be honest here, if I'm not I'm defeated.  In the post "Call me Dinosaur" I referenced a question that has plagued me the majority of my life, the question of why do the perverts seem to seek me out way, way more often than can be explained to any visible reason or motive.  In that post I said I had my answer.  Well, I did, at least to the surface level of events to be seen in the common reality, the second reality.  But the fullness of that answer must equally include things from the inner reality, the first reality of man where the true power source for actions and intentions originate.

There is a rage in me, there is.  It has been a bit of an epiphany for me as I've come to understand the nature of my own rage to realize I've never, ever met anyone involved in the bdsm lifestyle who did not also carry a rage imbedded like a spike into the fabric of their life.  The reasons for the rage, the depth and intensity of the rage of course varies widely person to person, me no exception.  But the mechanism of rage is consistent, and it is that mechanism that they recognize in each other, recognize in me.  The one point where I'm different than they is that the original injuries that condensed into my rage were derived directly from unwilling exposure to the brutalities of bdsm as a child.  Because of the nature of its' beginnings my rage runs a true 180 degrees opposite on any and every axis of thought, but it is still the same mechanism, and in me it is quite powerful enough to set me vigilante, set me lethal.  Answer complete.

As Paul Harvey would say, that's the rest of the story.  Now the question becomes how to take a rage, an anger crystallized into a rigid structure removed from the present, and break that crystal down into a powder fine enough to be flushed out of a life… and do so without all the things that were built on top of that crystal from falling into the hole that will be left when the crystal is gone.  I'm going to pursue that thought relentlessly until I'm confident of the correct answer.  I'm hunting that answer for myself, and for all the others who suffer in one way or another to the same injury.  In such an answer as that is my hope to ultimately defeat and remove from the collective memory of mankind the evil of bdsm that worked such injury on my life.

All the Flavors of Love...

Merci, merci, a great big dip of peppermint rocky road right... there... where it’s already all... No.  And don’t you dare even snicker a thought about anything peach flavored south of someone's belt.  Nope.  Not what I’m talking about.  I’m talking about love, not lust, not even the playful kind.

I’m talking about a morning shift waitress who has a kind thought and a bright smile for her regulars, a gal who’s known for giving quick hugs while walking the coffee pot around… no matter how tired she is.  I’m talking about a good mother who doubles her workload to enforce a genuine gentle discipline on her child who really, really needs to know the limits... for safeties sake.  I’m talking about the fireman who doesn’t hesitate before challenging hell… to make a rescue.  I’m talking about the emo little girl who can’t find any comfort at all for herself…  but can give comfort to the dying.  I’m talking love here folks, and that?  That is one freaking fragging hugely diverse concept that no one ever really seems to get a good grip on.  And they should, because Baskin Robins doesn't have a thing on Love for having a wide assortment of flavors.  Way to many folks settle on vanilla, or chocolate, maybe come to understand Neapolitan at best, and never realize just how much love really does pass through their lives.

For give or take the past two, three weeks I've been walking a road I've walked a few times before, a road no one should really have to walk, certainly not more than once.  But fate and a friend saw that I needed to, and well you know how fate is.  It's going to happen one way or another.  And my friend?  She walked it with me, even though it isn't her road, for her it wasn't the road across hell, just the road across me.  She knows she'll have to walk the road across her own hell, someday, and she knows I'll walk her across that one just like she walked me across mine.  Between now and that next walk it is mine to learn how to be as good a guide for her as she was for me.  Just one of so many flavors of love, what is between she and I.  Thanks sweetheart, you know who you are.

You know,  I don't really have a clue how many distinct flavors love can take on.  I'm a writer, I love to write a form of erotica I call anti-porn, methinks it's time I got serious about trying to really understand how many different ways genuine love gets presented to the world.  It isn't at all confined to the sexual, and yet the sum of the love in the world is what ultimately powers the erotic where the heat of that fusion forges homes and families strong enough to withstand the test of time.  That's what I'm after, I want to see more genuine families in my land.  Bottom line is that's what my land needs more than it needs anything else. 

*chuckle*  Strange fate, to be a contra-social rebel patriot and philosopher rubbing shoulders at the edges of "the lifestyle" with the shrinks and the subs and the doms and the godless preachers and the agents of God who rarely see the inside of a church… yea, right.  It would be so farking much easier if all we had to do was blow up one death star to make the whole problem go away.  Oh, well.  Time to put the pistol ammo in with the printer paper, they serve the same cause after all, get out the door and get on with it.

I forgot I enrolled...

*chuckle*  I'm of a mind to believe my lady friend has decided, in that wise woman way of hers, to open a campaign and case file on me.  I'll not begrudge her efforts, she means well,  I'll not refuse what she offers.  Pretty sure her motives are both genuine and ultimately benign on my behalf.

She has a project underway, and for her project she needed some light aluminum keystock reshaped a bit, the edges and corners rounded off, the faces free of dings and burrs.  She doesn't have access to such tools, such things are a staple of my life.  Of course I volunteered, sheesh, I was the one surveyed the need and picked out the stock for her.  Yesterday the situation had advanced to where the stock would be needed soon, it was time to go to work.  Now I'd planned to take the stock out in my garage and get real with the serious tools, make quick work of it, but she asked I bring the whole affair over to her house.  Ok, sure, it will take a bit longer but still quite do-able, I gathered up the dremel and files and such like to do it onsite. What the whale, working onsite the fit could be checked on the fly.

Another thing you need to know, to appreciate her effort, is that she knows my quite negative attitude concerning all things oriental, and it was she who decided I just had to learn to eat with chopsticks.  Yes, the lass in the post a few weeks back one and the same multi-cultural lady determined to make a beginning at civilizing me I suppose. I didn't balk, I wrote it off as covert ops training since someday I might need to fake it for a traitor just long enough to get in range.

Ok, I can work the damn things, the years of doing pencil art enough practice at fine motor control it wasn't all that hard.  Never mind that you're never supposed to lift your plate off the table (that cost you supper when I was a kid) and every  posture involved contradicts what I was taught as proper manners since you're never supposed to bend your wrist and shovel it in, but no matter.  That's just culture and everyone involved in setting those attitudes is dead, they're out of range to deal any more misery on the subject (it only took me five minutes to realize where the tension headache was originating, and shut it down).

Anyway, I got to her house, got the stuff inside and picked a spot in the living room to work.  Now shaping aluminum isn't really all that intellectually demanding, and I've had a lot of practice at setting the hands to a task and letting the majority of my mind roam free.  Directly I became aware of what was on the big screen TV: a history lesson about Japan from PBS, the history of the nation in its' early dealings with the Europeans tied off against the internal politics of the Shogun and the Samurai, stuff dating from the 1500's through the 1800's.  

Sometimes you just have to keep a straight face, and only grin on the inside. I suspected, but didn't know, not until I checked the broadcast schedule for yesterday… nope, no history lessons scheduled locally, that had to have come off the internet somewhere.  Little to no possibility of coincidental exposure, and her face had been way, way to blank while I was working, blank as if she was wondering when I'd object or make comment.  What the hell,  she offered it with that love of the nurturing variety which is a big part of why I'm so fond of her, and how can a man think ill of that?  Nah, you can't.  Like I said in the title, it must have just slipped my mind that I'd enrolled in her class... oh well.  If that's the worst thing I ever forget I'll be in great shape.

The Mechanics of Sin

Originally Posted 4/10/2011

I'm gonna talk about sin, trust me on that. But I'm going to talk about sin from an angle I promise you've not heard often, most likely you've never heard anyone talk about it the way I will. I promise. But give me just a bit, so I can set it up so I CAN talk about sin and not sound like the preacher man down at the church, OK? Thanks.

Most of my life I've worked in with technology, one form or another. Which means that most of my life I've been working with science after a fashion, the same rules apply. Somewhere about the middle of my life technology went stale for me, it's just kind of passé now. Ok, the guys and gals dialed it up another notch, fixed this, invented that, they can now do the same things a bit faster, a bit more convenient. Good for them, I'll buy one when the old one wears out. It isn't that big a deal anymore, not to me. What is a big deal to me is how people live, technology or no technology, and the parts of how people live that technology really never has effected at all are getting to be more and more important to me all the time, trying to really understand the world you and I and everyone has to share.

Tactical, Vigilante and Succubus...

Ok, if that’s how it lays that’s how it plays. This is a battle, and I’ll no more retreat from evil in my world than in my self.  To retreat is to give evil the victory unchallenged, an act of cowardice and treason.  Seems I recall a quote, not sure from whom, that goes “the only thing needed for evil to win is for good men to do nothing.”  Or words to that effect. Maybe Winnie?  No matter.  Sitting idly by while something eats the foundations out of your world is not a wise thing to do, not when things truly evil attack your chance to live with joy.

Now most will think of battles as between two major powers fighting it out in the physical realm: who has the biggest army, the best killing machines, the advantage of terrain or weather or line of supply.  This isn't that sort of a fight, even though it does share many of the same modes of thought.  This is a conflict between empowered lies and neglected truths, between the realms of ego inflamed and compassion revived, ultimately between the realms of love and hate, and each and every one of us is a battlefield of one sort or another.  Each and every one of us is under attack, and we all must mount some form of defense of self lest in the end we have no self left to defend.

There’s three things you absolutely must know to mount a successful defense. You need to know what it is you’re contesting, you need to know why you have the right to deny it existence, and you need to know what victory will look like.  Those are the strategic things you need.  Now in matters tactical of course it’s helpful to know who and where and how, of course that’s pretty valuable intel as well.  But not as critical as the first three.  There's a great many things I might say spinning off this paragraph, there's a veritable tome of thought this paragraph might serve as preamble for.  But those are not what I'm going to be writing about. 

I'm going to write about one of the enemy's main weapons, a tactical consideration.  This isn't intel comfortably come by, but a full understanding is vital to victory.  The enemy isn't going to lay down just to be accommodating, the enemy is going to continue its' campaign of aggression because bottom line is evil can not support itself in any other manner.  Evil is the inverse of life, it can not exist on its own, one way or another it has to have new victims to consume or it will die.

Control of memories, be they full or fragmentary, is one asset evil greatly desires.  Evil thrives on manipulating memories, calling them back into a false frame of reference to suit the evils' needs.  Why?  Because our memories can be used to influence our emotional environment of the moment in ways that serve evil in that moment.  It is a common tactic, a very common tactic, and a very effective one.

Take me for example.  All my life evil has used one person or another working my memories of the times I was physically abused in the name of love or falsely accused in the name of justice to transform justified anger into a blinding blood lust rage. I have to be continuously and acutely vigilant to deny evil access to my life by that road because should I slip up that rage displaces reality and disables any access to my ethical self.  In those moments I am more than capable of killing, I go vigilante and want to kill, and it isn't hard to imagine how evil could turn untimely recollection of old injuries into the headwaters of an entire river of new misery and injustice for evil to feed from for generations to come. 

In my case it is anger that evil attempts to remold to serve its' needs, but anger isn't the only emotion that can be transformed using distorted non-sequitur memories for a mold.  The insecurities that serve as the foundations for greed work very nicely, the middle monkey syndromes of cruelty are made to order, the scalding lust of misused sexuality has seen heavy service across history, even the seemingly benign live and let live attitudes currently held up as the apogee of civil behavior can be pressed into service when what evil needs is camouflage to allow some deep perversion of slow growth time to spread tentacle roots into many lives in many places rotting out the foundations of a society. 

Beware this most versatile weapon of the enemy, challenge your own memories and your own responses to those memories in the context of enforcing a sanctioned blockade on what evil needs to continue in our world.  Like I said, evil can not exist on its own, we can starve it out of existence if we've the inner courage to disable its' way of life.

Wisdom's Lament

Lay me where the cleft moons rise

Script lay of love in language high

Drawn fluted rune a verse devise

Writ poet's tongue to shallow'd sky,

Till bolder comes the rise and call

Seductress tempered feral sound

Birth chanting chorus begs the fall

A dancers leap lands lover found.

In candled ways cold days rewarm

Fire buried wick flame froth'd a foam,

Sans pain congeals conjoined form

Mold mate of man to forge a home

Entrain'd in woman's begging moan

Plea echoed heart to loins to bone.

Nah, can't happen, don't be a damn fool. You're mature, pragmatic, cynical, immune… you know better than that, you know what dreams like that do to the rest of your life, you know...

She was never more than a dream image anyway,

Some sweet fiction born of base biological urges

According to those sterilize the world in morality.

A man can't lift the weight of a crown off a dreams head,

Lift the heavy mantle of expectations off her shoulders,

Grant her seventy two hours as woman instead of dream,

One hour for every year accorded the life of man

To make love to her, with her, laugh and play,

Set a symphony of delights in the nerves of her body,

Hold her warm while she sleeps, dry her tears,

Give back to her a bit of what she gave so many

Before she has to put that damn crown back on

And go back to being the Queen of Dreams,

Safe sanctuary for the lonely and the displaced…

I won't miss her, not at all.

Yea, right.           

If you believe that?     

Likely you'll believe anything.

For Alex, with love.

Call Me Dinosaur…

Well, that's a wrap.  I have one of my answers that I've been looking for.  I don't like the answer, but it is an answer.  And what an answer it was, what an utter and complete insult it is.

For some time now, like say the last thirty some years, I've been wondering what I'm doing so very wrong that I'm a magnet for the debauched and the perverted.  What?  I don't wear a sign, I'm not in their social registers, I don't think I'm on anyone's special high intensity training list.  So what is it that attracts them to me?  I asked a kid down at the diner I know to be part of the bdsm world that question, and I got my answer. 

She was sincere, and in her sincerity she tipped a balance in my head.  Once upon a time she had been sitting in my living room, and out of the clear blue with a look simply dripping malice and contempt said "I could be a dom to you that would make you beg mercy." 

In the moment I went serious, stood to battle stations and stared her in the eye.  "No, you could not," I replied. It was a staring match for several seconds before the moment faded.  I let it pass, figured she was just jacking with me for sport.  But today that moment was explained to me, and a sadder man and wiser I now am. 

I've been called judgmental a fair number of times because in my world there are a few absolutes.  Not so very many, but a few and I live to them.  You don't beat up on the helpless, you don't cheat at cards, you don't try and lie to your God or yourself, and you don't surrender your self respect and dignity to anyone's assertion of authority no matter what they say.

These things are all basic Manhood101 according to the way I was raised. (in post script... I'd said American in the first, hastily written form, but no.  It isn't a thing of nationality, it is a basic thing of uncorrupted humanity... please pardon my moment of nationalism)  But apparently that isn't so very true anymore, not everywhere as it should be.  What she told me is that the effort of manhood is considered an undue burden, and the cure for that burden is to voluntarily subject yourself to enough abuse your spirit is degraded into blow sand to be used in etching your tombstone.  Well, maybe among the bdsm crowd that's how it plays, but not with me. 

What did I say to her?  I said "I don't beg mercy, I shoot."  And then I said goodbye.

She said what attracted her kind to me was seeing me carry that burden at best ability, and carrying on with the intent of doing what I can where I stand for the good of the cause.  She said that's why so many of them over the years have tried to seduce me into weakness and impotent misery.  They thought I needed to be free of the very burden I maintain is my justification for existing.  I suppose that's what I get for NOT  being so very judgmental, for not judging people on their demeanor and being willing to talk to anyone who wants to shoot the breeze. 

Sorry (NOT), I intend to keep right on talking to anyone who wants to shoot the breeze.  But, I think I'd better be a little more careful than I have been, and watch where I go until I've gotten the appropriate hardware and permitting in place.  Sooner or later some well meaning freak is going to decide that if I don't have the good sense to degrade my life voluntarily they'll just be good Samaritans and do it for me, and I'd have serious problems with that idea.

So for now the 12 gauge and little .22 will have to serve.  In a moment of sheer stupidity (and financial crisis) I sold my last hog-leg and M1 some years ago.  Where I really do like the big Ruger and the awesome knockdown power of the .45LC round it really isn't well suited for daily wear.  Automatics are fast firing and prolific, but they're not as reliable as a revolver and you might not have time to jack the action.  So… perhaps a Bulldog, or the likes.  Something ultimately reliable with enough knock down power to qualify as a euthanasia grade self defense weapon at extremely close range.  Something to make a terminal argument in favor of freedom from the worst kind of oppression there is, the kind of self induced degradation some believe is the way we all should live voluntarily.  That's what concealed carry is all about.  Call me a dinosaur, I don't care.  That's why I live in America.

The Ghosts of Gomorrah

First published 11/7/2010

Since the story first broke concerning the mistreatment of prisoners of war in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq I've believed that abuse, particularly the sexual abuse inflicted by female soldiers of the United States military police, was a deliberate open air black op initiated to outrage the enemy beyond any hope of a negotiated settlement.


When the nature of the mistreatment suffered by the prisoners was released my first question was had the Army deliberately assembled an entire unit of MP's around the psychological deformity of sexual sadism? It would take a unit in full consensus for such outrages to proceed on any regular basis. There would be risk to such a plan, the transfer orders to build such a unit would show willful intent to a court of law and the unit would be dangerously hard to conceal if entrusted with the normal duties of the military police.

Still though, such a unit would be an ideal choice to set into history the sort of events that will galvanize a people into maintaining guerilla warfare against all odds, said determination exactly what the Bushites would need to assure their carefully choreographed and most profitable little war would continue unabated for the run of their political power.