Monthly Archives: June 2015

life, love, story

Remembering the low points

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We all have low points.

Father’s Day is one of mine…

There are multiple reasons for this.  One is the abysmal relationship that I have with my own father, but the magnitude of that in determining my overall feelings about the day pale in comparison to the other thing that always sticks in my craw on this day…

My girlfriend is away for the weekend, which is probably a good thing on balance, but at first it was a bit of blow for me.  We recently had a pretty big fight.  The worst of it is that the fight was almost entirely my fault.  If you’ve been following along, you know that my job situation is a bit tense right now – not that I’m in any danger of losing my job, mind you, just that my boss is unbearable and is doing everything in her power to make my work life miserable.  This is one of those times that I’m happy that I work to live rather than the other way around.. anyway.. I’ve been dealing with a great deal of stress lately.  My girlfriend and I just took a Caribbean cruise, so I was able to unplug for a full week and experience some things that were new to me as well as bringing new experiences to her (which is one of my biggest kinks…) so I was in a pretty good place, until we got back.  Then work started to invade upon my consciousness in both waking and sleeping hours.  I was having more and more difficulty in putting the work things behind me when I went home, and that’s where things exploded.

I’m not going to go into the details, but suffice it to say that every relationship requires work, and my girlfriend and I have learned a few places where we need to communicate better, and we’re now stronger for the experience.  Oddly enough, the problem areas for us are not related to anything else in this post, nor to the reasons why Father’s Day is a hard day for me.

So let’s get to the real story then, shall we?

My marriage ended on Father’s Day.

That’s not exactly the whole truth, and there were lots of things that were going wrong as early as a year prior, but it was Father’s Day, five years ago, when my marriage finally ended for truth.

This is one of the reasons why monogamy makes me so squeamish.  I would have let her have her weekend with her paramour and probably even much more if she had been willing to open up our marriage, but when we’d talked about that as an option she was always against it.  I’m still, to this day, unsure why.

Ultimately, I’m not unhappy with the result, because I would not be where I am today without those experiences, but a repeat of the same thing terrifies me to my bones.

My ex-wife was away on a business trip which she had extended for several days – including over the weekend, which was not entirely necessary for business purposes, but there was someone that she wanted to spend time with on the East coast where her trip was taking her.

I had confronted her about her extramarital relationship about a month prior.  I’m something of a computer security expert and I had gathered evidence of her affair and the man with whom she was cheating on me.  I knew that her trip was going to be taking her to his part of the country, and I knew that they would be spending time together.

Before she left, I had a conversation with her.  I told her that I wanted to stay in the marriage, that I still loved her, that I wanted to preserve our family, and that I would be willing to open the marriage so that she could explore this relationship if that was her choice.  She assured me that she was merely ‘going through a phase’ and that she had not, and would not, actually cheat on me with this other man.

She asked me if she could still go on her trip.  To this day, I’m still not sure why she was asking me for permission.

She told me that she needed to go for work, but that she would not see this man if I told her not to.

So I told her not to.

Then she backpedaled and said that she had to see him because part of her job function depended upon it.

I told her to do what she needed to do.

She assured me that she would not meet him outside of work environs, that she would not pursue the attraction that she felt, and that she would remain faithful.

She didn’t.

Electronic surveillance is wonderful, and it can give you all sorts of soul-crushing information if you’re not careful with it, but it can never give you the full picture.

The details of how I came about the information that I received are not important, but suffice it to say, my reach, especially in those days, was vast.

On Father’s Day, with the father of her two daughters (that would be me) at home, taking care of them in her absence, she spent the entire day entertaining him.  She took him to her hotel room that night after dinner, and being very careful to not have intercourse, she did just about every other sex act possible with him.

The worst came immediately following that.

Her guilt got the better part of her, and at 2am local time, just after she has swallowed his semen and he left her room to go to his own home, she called me on the phone to tell me how much she loved me and missed me and the kids.

She woke me to assuage her conscience.

She had betrayed me before that in her heart, but this was the first act that went against her promise and it was the first for which she felt guilty enough to make the choice to leave me.

Tomorrow is Father’s Day.

I’m home, alone with my daughters, and tomorrow we’re going to have pancakes for breakfast because that is the tradition that I started with them after their mom and I separated.

It began a year after the events that I just related, and it’s always been this way, just them and me.

I don’t want that to always be the case, and I know that it won’t be, but perhaps it’s good that it is for one more year.

There is a dark nostalgia in remembering the low points.

There is a deep desire to wallow in the pain and misery, but that is no longer who I am, and while I can appreciate these feelings, I am no longer overwhelmed by them.

Life is all about love and learning and growing and I hope I never stop any of those things.

Remembering the low points, I am Rant.

Tomorrow is the first day of a new era.

And tomorrow always is.

bdsm, life

Tips for dealing with vanilla authorities.

Firstly, let me say that this article is for entertainment purposes.  I’m not a lawyer, I don’t claim to be one, and I am neither qualified to give nor interested in giving actual legal advice.  This article represents my own experiences, most of which fall completely outside of the written law (if not perhaps the spirit of the law.)

Secondly, it’s been almost a month since I added a new post and the last one that I did was pretty shitty, and yet, there are at least a few dedicated people who visit my page every day.  Thank you for your support or curiosity or whatever it is that keeps you coming back.  Believe it or not, it means something.  I appreciate it.

Obviously, with the lack of new content, readership and email volumes go down.  It doesn’t help anything that I was out of the country for a week and could not get or respond to emails, but I have received a relatively large number of emails lately about one topic in particular, and I have been working for some time on a post to address that issue, but this is not that post.  It is coming though.

So, I’ve been involved in kink for quite some time now, and that involves things like air travel with toys, dealing with the cops on unrelated matters while in possession of kink gear, and all sorts of other dealings with vanilla people when they stumble across something that to them is shocking.

The very first thing that I will say about this is quite simple, and I’m going to steal the line from one of my favorite authors (and former humans,) Douglas Adams – “Don’t Panic.”  If you can remember that statement and live by it, you can get through almost anything.  That and, “Always remember where your towel is,” but that’s a separate issue.

If you happen to find yourself in a security inspection line and they start making noise about something that the x-ray shows is in your bag, Don’t Panic.

If you happen to find yourself in a police pat-down and one of the officers starts asking pointed questions about why you have a handcuff key on your keychain, Don’t Panic.

If you happen to be packing up your apartment and your mom starts to lift your mattress off the bed and then notices the nylon webbing restraints under the mattress, Don’t Panic.

I’m a Dominant.  This does not mean that I spend all of my life ordering people around or even that I’m always going to approach every interaction with any person from a position of confidence and authority, but it does help.  I make mistakes, I falter, I even occasionally socially submit when it is appropropriate or when I’m not thinking about it.  Often, this is the right thing to do.  In the case of dealing with authority figures who have an ability to make your life miserable, this is usually the right thing to do, but it doesn’t always have to be a case of purely cow-towing to the cops, or something like that.

I’m also Caucasian.  I’m pretty sure that this is a huge benefit to me when dealing with authority figures.  It’s entirely possible that you may get roughed up for trying some of the things that I’ve done.  You have been warned.

Firstly, and most important, know the law.  Laws vary from country to country, state to state, and even municipality to municipality, and it is important to know what you might be dealing with before you begin.  For instance, in some jurisdictions, the possession of handcuffs, or even handcuff keys, can be legally limited to individuals who have gone through POST (Peace Officer Standards and Training) procedures or something similar – this can mean that only cops or security guards are allowed to have them in that jurisdiction.  However, in most jurisdictions, this is not the case, and anyone can possess handcuffs.  Therefore, it’s important to know what applies to you if you’re going to be putting yourself in a position where it might become a question.

Secondly, and nearly as important, realize that authority does not come with knowledge.  Oh, it should, that’s for damned sure, but often the police officer that you are dealing with is going to be more ignorant of the actual laws and statutes covering kink activities or equipment than you are.  This does not give you license to teach them… that was a lesson that I had to learn the hard way…  cops don’t like civilians lecturing them about the law, it tends to piss them off, and then you escalate things, which is something you definitely don’t want.

And finally… be pleasant.  Smile.  Laugh.  Don’t be confrontational.  When you get confrontational, you put the authority figure on the defensive.  They then fall back to their training and try to make sure that everything that they do is, ‘by the book.’  They will literally force down their own humanity and attempt to become robotic, just to make sure that they cover their own ass in case you try to file a complaint or take things to court.  Once they let go of their humanity, the odds of you getting out of the situation without involving the courts drop to almost zero, and no one wants that.

Remember, cops and security guards, like all humans, are inherently lazy people.  They don’t want to do more work.  They want to do a good job, and most of them got into the work that they do because they want to make the world a safer place, so if they feel like you are dangerous, they will arrest you.  It is your job to show them that you are not harming anyone, that you understand the difference between malice and fun, and that you can be trusted to decide how to act for yourself.  If they can be convinced that you are not a threat to anyone (including yourself,) that you understand what you’re doing, and that you are a responsible, well-balanced individual, then the odds are very good that they’re going to simply leave you be.  Arresting you makes more work for them.  They may even have to give up their day off to go to court to testify against you, and they’d much rather just be able to say that they spoke with you and determined that there was nothing illegal happening.

All that being said, some people are just dicks.  Some people get into positions of power because they like abusing that power to make other people uncomfortable.  In those situations, don’t let yourself be victimized, but remember, it’s probably better/cheaper/faster to just let the bastards confiscate your flogger and bear the expense of buying a new one than it is to go through the hassle of dealing with the courts, possibly having to hire a lawyer, and potentially even having to spend time in jail.  If the authority figure is hell-bent on exerting his authority and refuses to act like a human, sometimes the best thing to do is to submit.

Yep – I said it… even as a Dominant, sometimes the best thing to do is to submit.

There is fodder in that statement for a whole philosophical discussion, but not today.

So, to recap, be cool, get out of the way of yourself, and remember, some people are just dicks.