Tag Archives: life

The invasive and insidious nature of hate

I recently posted about myself again, and it continues a pattern that has been reinforced since I first started writing here.

My posts to this blog seem to generate interest in a few different forms.

Sometimes, people find what I write about interesting or informative and they either want to ask a question or have a comment and will comment on the post directly here on the blog.  Most of the time this happens when I am writing either informative or erotic pieces.

But sometimes, people find what I write about emotionally impactful, and I get email directly.

Often – more often than not, thankfully – these are positive things.  I get messages from people all of the time telling me that I have made a positive impact on their life because I shared something difficult or I exposed something that they could relate to in a way that made their own experiences easier to understand or more acceptable somehow.  I’ve been told that I have been directly or indirectly responsible for saving peoples’ lives. That alone is some heavy stuff, but it’s good – I can feel good about the fact that I am helping people, and I can feel good about the example that I try to set for how I live my life.

But sometimes… people find what I write about emotionally challenging in some less positive ways.

I also get a lot of hate mail.  Not as much as I used to, actually, but I recently gave these people more ammunition to use in an attempt to hurt me with my diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder and some of the other things that I have recently said and done as part of my life in the BDSM scene – and some of the things that I’m getting emails about are related to things that I have not even revealed on this blog – which ratchets up the fear a notch or three.

This means that I am getting hate mail to my blog from someone who knows me personally.

Even when it’s only an email, or its just someone filling in my Contact Me form, it is difficult to see messages where people tell me to kill myself.

It is difficult to read that someone thinks I have so little value as a person that I would be doing the world a favor by removing myself from it.

It is scary as fuck to read that someone knows the city I live in and would take any opportunity they had to beat the shit out of me or that they might show up at my house and set it on fire.

It hurts to read that someone that I have personally interacted with believes that my way of life is so repugnant that I should subject myself to terrible, painful, torturous ways of killing myself, and that the lives of everyone that I love would be improved by removing the stain of my existence from their lives.

Recently, I’ve made calling cards.  I’ve been trying to more closely engage with my community and to put myself out there a bit more for the good that I may be able to do as well as to increase my own exposure and possibly increase my reach.  It’s never been a strong goal of mine to create a personal brand or chase fame on the internet, but the good things that I hear urge me to try to at least reach a bit further – until I hit the barriers that I am coming up against again now.

This becomes important because those calling cards are the first time that I have linked this blog to my fetlife profile (where there are pictures of my face) and my phone number – and only recently have I started to receive text messages and phone calls from people who are spewing hate as well.

Honestly, it makes me want to run away.  It makes me want to pull up shop here, stop writing altogether and even to withdraw from my community.  It makes me afraid to go outside sometimes. It makes me afraid to have my kids stay with me at my own house.  And while I can rationalize away the fear and despair, I can never really get rid of them completely, and it weighs on me, heavily.

I have nightmares almost every night.  These are the result of trauma from my youth more often than not – memories that I have suppressed trying to percolate back up into consciousness – so I know that these are not necessarily only because of this newly increased volume of hate that I am receiving each day, but I would be incredibly foolish if I didn’t consider that it is having an effect.

I don’t know who is making these threats and sending me so much hate – and while I could probably find out, I am terrified to learn the answers to those questions, terrified to learn that someone I love harbors such deep seated loathing for me and feels like they can only express it pseudo-anonymously and with such bile.

I do not always succeed in putting forth the best version of me, but I do try very hard, and I try very hard to be open to criticism and discussion about how I act and the ways in which I may have made you feel.  And if you know me personally and I have somehow offended you, I would very much appreciate the chance to rationally discuss the things that have hurt you, but if you are just a hateful stalker who wants only to cause me harm, I can tell you that you have succeeded.

The hate that I feel seeps into my soul and makes everything seem bleak.  It gets into everything that I think and everything that I do and it makes it almost impossible to concentrate or accomplish anything of substance.  I try to counter it with love, and to an extent I succeed, but the fear never seems to completely disappear. I try to ignore it and focus on the other things that make my life the amazing thing that it is.  I have amazing people in my life who love me and support me, and even those who no longer wish to be a part of my life, or those who I care about but cannot make fit into this chaos claim to love and want to support me, if but from a further distance – and I feel the same way about them.  Much of the time I succeed, but sometimes the hate seeps back in like an oily stain that you can never quite remove from your favorite jeans.

I am Rant, and I am not going nowhere, but you have made me afraid.  Bully for you.

 

The many faces of Rant

I have made a number of difficult admissions through this site.  This is probably the most terrifying thing I’ve ever contemplated posting to a public site and it has nothing to do with BDSM but everything to do with me.

I’ve made no secret of the fact that I have been through psychotherapy and have been on prescriptions for psychoactive drugs at various times in my past – over the course of writing this blog, even.  However, I have not been completely open about one of the more challenging aspects of my atypical neurology, and in order to be consistent with my mission, I have to be unflinchingly transparent and vulnerable, so here I am…

I have Dissociative Identity Disorder.

For those of you who don’t know what that is,  you can follow the link above or just accept that it is the current accepted terminology for what used to be called multiple personality disorder.  There is literally more than one person living in my body – though the degrees to which they make themselves known can vary tremendously.

The ways in which it can manifest are legion, and I have been in deep denial about my own condition for years, which created more than a few problems for me.  I was able to conceal it from almost everyone, even from myself – perhaps most especially from myself, by being paranoid and attempting to control every aspect of every moment of every day of my life.  I spent huge amounts of mental and even physical energy in just monitoring myself for consistency and trying to portray an unbroken narrative for myself and everyone who interacts with me.

It was exhausting.

I developed habits though… I repeat myself a lot, both in written and verbal communications.  Most people completely fail to notice, but those who do tend to think that I am merely emphasizing the things that I want to say for effect – and often that is the case, at least in part, but sometimes I’m also doing it so that I can make sure that I will remember…   I meditate – and when I forget to do that, or when life gets in the way too often and I don’t make the time – I suffer for it. I use drugs to force my mind into the state I want it to be in sometimes as well. Nootropics and psychoactive chemicals are my friends and allies.

The memory gaps are the worst thing.

I can be working, sitting at my desk, writing code and being in the zone, and then I will lose track of time and space and my consciousness will return and I will find myself in a completely different part of the office or in the kitchen or even in my car, completely unaware of hours of time that have passed where I have had conversations with coworkers, accomplished work goals, even eaten meals or used the bathroom.  That happens with some frequency, and I’ve just grown accustomed to it. I have learned to ask leading questions and prompt people to fill in missing information for me in conversations all of the time, because when I’m at work, about a third of the time it isn’t really me there.

Sometimes when I go out to my favorite weekly event – Bondage a Go Go – I will end up finding myself at home in bed and not remember how I got there.  Sometimes there are people with me throughout this entire process – my former partner would frequently accompany me to and from BaGG and spend the night with me, and often I would not remember things from some point after our arrival until the next day.  Often pieces will come back to me, but sometimes they won’t – until my personality shifts again, and then all of the corresponding memories come flooding back in again, only to be lost anew when I shift again.

My personality shards – my alters – to use the common parlance, each have different motives and desires and personalities and while I am fortunate enough that these are almost always in concert with each other, sometimes they are not.  Sometimes they even conflict with each other… and as you can probably imagine, this makes dealing with me difficult sometimes.  I can seem like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde at times, I’m sure.

Recently, this has all been very different though – and not in a very flattering way.

When I was suppressing the expression of personality shifts, I would minimize the impact, even when they happened.  I would go on with life as if I was always the one at the controls and while I had gaps in my memory of things, I could usually fill them in pretty effectively and by denying the gaps existed, I was presenting myself and everyone around me with an unbroken narrative.

And that is how we experience the world, I’m realizing… I mean, I’ve always known this, but it is not something that I usually spend much time thinking about.  We experience everything as a continuous story, beginning when we are born and ending when we die.  This is the normal, expected, and understood way in which people live their lives – when you’re trying to explain anything to someone else, one of the most effective ways to do that is to relate it with a story.  

With the exception of our daily sleep periods, humans experience their entire world as an unbroken narrative.

Except — I don’t.  There are breaks in the narrative for me – every day.  When I was not monitoring myself as much, and when I denied my interior pieces, I failed to notice this, but the narrative of my life is not unbroken – and there are pieces missing for me all of the time.

I had no idea how much this was affecting me.

To be experiencing so much missing time and to be openly accepting the transitions was causing my mind to fragment even more.  Personality characteristics that are dominant with one alter were beginning to bifurcate more tenaciously and rapidly, leaving my dominant self, the one who I most often consider to be me, with the least agency that I can remember ever having.  

The parts were growing at the expense of what remained of me.

For some reason that I can’t explain – maybe it’s self-selection bias, maybe it’s something else – the BDSM community seems to be home to many more people with DID than would match population statistics.  I know several people in my local scene who also have DID and one of the more fascinating things to me is how the disorder manifests differently in different people.

Most of my friends and acquaintances who have the disorder have the ability to conduct conversations between their alters within their own mind.  The only way that I have ever been able to have an actual conversation with a different part of myself was very recently when I was staring at myself in the mirror and having a conversation with myself.  

My alter – who is known as Damien, though he doesn’t refer to himself that way except to note his presence to those in the know – would talk through my mouth at me as I stared at the mirror, and he would respond to things that I thought back at him – so anyone watching the conversation would only hear Damien’s voice, and I imagine it would have been really fucking freaky to watch.

Damien told me about the world as he sees it, a little bit about what he wants, and a lot more about how he wanted my former partner to succeed, and plans for how she can probably do that.  He told me about his disappointment in me. He told me that he does not understand why I let myself get hurt, and he offered to take over for me. Permanently.

I almost let him.

It is something that I still think about.  Since having that weird conversation with myself a couple of weeks ago, I’ve been unstable.  I have a very hard time concentrating on anything at all. I can tell that he feels much more stable, more in control, more complete than he used to be.  

A completely different alter – one who lives in a very different world than I do, and who believes in things like magic and supernatural connections between things – led Damien and I through a ritual that was intended to close some of the gaps in my memory and help him to cope with the fact that his carefully laid plans were falling apart and give him some broader context in which to operate.  

As far as I can tell – from his perspective – it was a complete success.  I feel slightly more grounded than I did, and it did return a small portion of the personal agency that I feel was eroding, but he is resplendent.  He has been staying out of the light because I did not accept his offer to take over control for me, but his fear and doubt are gone, and mine still remain – and may be even greater, and while I don’t actually know if his offer is still valid, it tempts me even now.

But it is a terrifying thing.  It feels like a lesser form of suicide.  If I do this – who will I really be? I know that I won’t disappear entirely, Damien doesn’t when he is no longer in control – and he continues to learn and grow.  

I am nearly certain that this is something that I have already done once before – not to let Damien take over for me, but for me to take over for the one who could no longer handle living.

I may very well be the result of a first suicide of this type, and the original progenitor me is still locked inside me somewhere, but he never comes out anymore – would that be my fate if I were to surrender to the more Dominant part of me?

Who knows?  Perhaps it is all delusion anyway.

I’m still too afraid to try – still too afraid to know.

And so – I remain Rant.   For now.

 

My sacred mission in life

It kind of started out as a joke.  The statement was completely true and made without any sort of deception or guile, but it seemed so outrageous that even though I was the one saying it, I had a hard time believing it.

I was on a date, and my date and I didn’t know each other very well as normally happens in the early stages of dating, so she asked me, “What is your passion?”

Such a broad question…

Normally this sort of question kind of puts my mind into overload as I try to think about all of the different possible answers and I get kind of paralyzed, but on this particular occasion the answer came quickly and almost without thought.

“I make it my sacred mission in life to make it acceptable for every person to be who they really are at their core.”

I usually actually try to go further than that and help everyone to be the best version of themselves that they can be, but that requires a great deal of work on their part, whereas the above statement only really requires that I be interested, nonjudgmental, supportive, patient, and caring – and I’m really quite good at those things, most of the time.

I’ve tried to refine this a bit, especially in the case of the people that I actually have close relationships with, because with those people I can take a more active hand in helping them to realize the things that are holding them back and realizing how they can be the best versions of themselves that they can be.

Of course, none of this is worth anything without me also doing work on myself and learning along the way as well, and I do my best to do that, every day.  

One of my former mentees likes to tell people that I am responsible for her being kinky – or, she did, until I started to correct her each time she said it, with something like this, “No, little one, I didn’t make you who you are, I just accepted you and made it okay for you to be who you were all along.”

My goal in life for myself is to be as authentically me as I can manage.  I try to let go of the guilt and shame that I’ve been gifted with by family and religion and society and I try to listen to the internal voices within me, understand their needs, and so long as it doesn’t hurt anyone to do so, satisfy them.

My sacred mission in life is to help you do exactly the same.

 

Just Another Wednesday

Every Wednesday I go to an event called Bondage a Go Go.  I think I may have mentioned it before.

In keeping with my continuing desire and goal to say what I mean rather than couch my insecurities about showing enthusiasm with understatement or otherwise deflect, I’m going to call myself out for saying such things as, “It’s just another Wednesday,” or something similar.  It’s an inside joke, and anyone that I say it to understands that around here, Wednesdays are something special.  But I should just come out and say that.

Wednesdays are special because that is when BaGG happens, and BaGG is the best and longest-running weekly kink-friendly social event ever, anywhere.

Full disclosure – I am a member of the BGG Association that promotes and puts on Bondage a Go Go, but I have no financial stake and all of my efforts to advertise it here or in person are volunteer – because I am an acolyte.

Today is Wednesday, and I am elated – because no matter how bad life gets me down, on Wednesdays I have BaGG, and BaGG is therapy, family, validation, energization, and grounding all rolled into one.  BaGG is where I can be mostly safe in being mostly me, and it is glorious.

“It feels like I’m in a movie.” – F

I still remember the first time that I went to BaGG.  I didn’t know anyone, and I was alone, and it was overwhelming.  It’s really just a bar, but it’s dark inside and people are wearing next to nothing and acting sexy as fuck.  There is a dance floor in the front and two bars along with seating areas, a house masseur, a swag counter, and a dungeon in the back.

The first time you’re seeing something like this, it can be a lot to take in.  Even as a seasoned kinkster, it was more than I expected in some ways and less than I expected in other ways, but one thing became abundantly clear to me within moments.  BaGG is not a place or an event, BaGG is a people.

That first time that I was there, I was not a part of BaGG – I was present, I was physically there and I was watching and I was drinking and I was dancing and I was socializing, but I was not really a part of it.

I was disheartened, and I would leave to go home, knowing that it was something special, but feeling on the outside, and it would be years before I would return.

BaGG is a “kink-friendly take over of a night club” – C

BaGG is really just a weekly party in a bar with kinky themes.  It’s not a BDSM event in the more general sense.  There is not a dungeon floor where people are heard making noises of pleasure and pain surrounded by a wall of silence from the onlookers.  There are not rooms where people can sequester themselves and do nasty, horrible things to each other.  There are no classes or lessons or things to learn.

There is a dungeon, and it is small, and exposed, and your audience will cheer for you as you get beaten.  There is a tradition of very public spanking with the entire bar cheering for you on your birthday or the birthday of your Dominant.  And I will have to tell you, the three young ladies who took my spankings for me and the three Dominants (they were not all male) who delivered them while I stood by and basked in the glow of adoration from the crowd certainly contributed to make my year last year.

The dungeon is great fun, largely underutilized despite the fact that you have to wait for your turn more often than not, and also completely not the point of BaGG.

“I just go for the dancing.” – S

The dance floor at BaGG is amazing.

No where else that I am aware of do you have as many ultra sexy people dancing alongside straight up freaks – and often they are the very same people.

It’s right there in the name – there are Go Go dancers.  You can tip them if you like.  They won’t take off their clothes for you, but they’re not wearing that much to begin with.

The greatest show doesn’t come from the dancers on the stage or in the cage though – it comes from the people on the floor.

I don’t spend nearly enough time on the dance floor at BaGG, but if I don’t get out and dance every once in awhile, I get restless – and I don’t really dance anywhere else.

I’m a terrible dancer – I have to be only part of me to have any rhythm at all, but I don’t really care.   My partners dance, my friends dance, I’ve met people on the dance floor, no one cares that I’m terrible at it – it’s just another part of the wonderful pervasive blanket of love that falls on me when I am there with my people.

“…people generally seem to know each other.” – A

I wasn’t a part of BaGG at first, but I went, and I put myself out there, and I kept going back and talking to the same people and learning that they felt the same way that I do – about politics and kink and love, but most importantly, about BaGG.

It was the piece that was missing for me until I just kept showing up.  I’ve always felt like I could be at home at BaGG, but even still it took time before I felt like I was a part of it.

“How do I become a member?” I asked.

The answer is simple.  Show up.  Talk to people.  Get to know the club and the personalities, let people know who you are, and then when two members in good standing will speak up for you and say, “This guy is not an asshole,” we’ll collect your dues and you will be one of us.

It’s nice to be one of us somewhere.

I’m at BaGG almost every week – it’s rare that I’m not there.

If ever you want to meet me, go to BaGG, look for the guy in a waistcoat and fancy knot in his tie, and you’ll likely find me.

  • Rant

My Personal Journey : Part 8

Mistress Simone was confusing – at times she seemed entirely without compassion.  I do not know the full details of her operation, and in retrospect, that is a very good thing, but I did catch glimpses from time to time – especially when she left town on one occasion after I’d been in place for a few months and I took it upon myself to look after what I could – in an ill-fated attempt to impress her.  I do know that the weight of keeping things running smoothly got to her from time to time, and I do know that anxiety was one of her demons as well.

But sometimes, she was incredibly caring and empathetic.  She seemed to always know what was going to happen before it did.  She not only seemed to know the specific details of what would occur, but she seemed to always know how I would feel too.  There was brief period of time where I entertained the notion that she could actually see into the future, but that wasn’t it at all, she was just a master of understanding the human condition, of reading the desires of people and finding ways to fulfill them.  It was as skill that she attempted to impart on me – and one that I would like to think that I have become adept at myself.

On this particular occasion – I didn’t even know that I needed support, but Simone did, and she was there for me.  

I had just met with my first client, Mary, (the details of which you can read about here, if you wish) and it had gone amazingly well.  Subsequent meetings with other clients, and even with Mary herself, did not always go so well. I was very fortunate to have had the first time experience that I did – something which I suspect Simone had specifically engineered, but I do not know for certain, and as I said, Mistress Simone was often confusing.

I was confused to see Mistress Simone when she showed up at my door after I’d run around tidying and getting clean after Mary had left.  I was certain that I’d done something wrong to earn her visit, but she had something else in mind.

She walked into my apartment, looking stunning as always, and not knowing what else to do, I dropped to my knees in front of her.  She looked at me, but walked past me to go sit at on the edge of my bed and placed her hands to her sides at the edge and regarded me.

“Rant. You did nothing wrong. Stand up and come over here with me…”

I stood up and walked over to the base of the steps below where my bed was.  Even sitting as she was, her head was level with mine as I stood below. Not knowing what else to do, I stood there at parade rest and regarded her.  She was dressed more casually than I was used to seeing her, in a lengthy flowing skirt and a loose-fitting top. Normally, her clothing was tight, fitted perfectly, or she was wearing little more than underwear, but now she looked … ordinary.  It was unsettling.

“How did it go?”

I wasn’t sure how to answer.  I felt like it had gone very well, but was considerably less sure of that after being visited by Mistress Simone.  I began to go over events in my mind, disassembling them and looking for all of the points of failure along the way.  I was about to answer with a list of perceived faults, when Simone interrupted me.

“No, don’t answer now…  It’s okay.  Come, kneel at my feet, toy.”

I did as she asked, stepping up onto the platform where my bed rested, and knelt to the right side of her.  She scooted over a bit to the right and centered herself around me, and then spread her legs and motioned for me to come closer, so I knee-walked until I was kneeling between her legs, and then she patted the inside of her thigh and I somehow knew that she wanted me to rest my head there, so I knelt lower, and then rested my head on her thigh as she began to pet my hair.

Mistress Simone’s skirt was split up the sides, which is something that I didn’t really notice until she sat and spread her legs, allowing her bare thighs to protrude from the sides, one of which my face was now pressed against as I tried to look up into her face and she pet my hair, which invariably caused my face to turn towards her body – and her pussy – instead.  At first, I kept trying to crane my head up to look into her face as I lay there, my whole body tense with the weird angles required to accomplish such a thing. Once I started to say something, to ask my Mistress questions about what she wanted from me, what I should be doing, because to just be kneeling there, leaning against my bed and her thigh, having her pet my hair, was making me anxious.  I felt like I had done something to displease her, I thought that I should be doing something differently…

Opening my mouth to speak the questions that were flooding my mind, I changed my posture slightly, and it became clear that despite her silence, Mistress Simone was watching me intently, because the moment that my mouth began to open, she shifted her hand from petting me, to wrap around my jaw and gently push my mouth back closed.  When she moved her hand away for a moment, I began to open my mouth yet again, and she repeated the same action, with the same levels of both deliberation and tenderness. Once again, she moved her hand away, and when I did not try to open my mouth again, she resumed petting my hair. I still had no idea what to do, and my anxiety was making me restless.  I shifted in my position on my knees, and when I moved, Mistress Simone’s hand would stop.

After several minutes of this – what seemed like an inordinately long period of time – I eventually reasoned that she wanted me to just relax and be there, kneeling loosely, head on her thigh, with her petting my hair.  Eventually, I did just that, letting go of the tension, relaxing into my lean against the bed and her thigh, allowing myself to feel the comfort present in her strokes of my hair.

My breathing slowed, I could feel my body temperature dropping, and the anxiety that I had been holding on to – all afternoon at least, perhaps all day – finally began to flow out of me.  I felt grounded for the first time in a long time, peaceful in a way that I had only experienced a few times in my life before, and those were all what one could only properly describe as ‘religious’ experiences.  It may be the closest I ever really came to feeling in subspace myself, and perhaps it actually was, but it was fleeting, and replaced by the most unexpected of things for me at that time.

I began to cry.

I don’t mean that I sat silently as tears streamed down my face as I am oft wont to do today, nor that I was overcome by emotion to the degree that I commonly see in people when they try to hide their tears from me.  This was crying of a primordial sort. A part of me broke in that moment, and I sobbed.  Eventually, it became impossible to stay as I was, the sobs causing me to curl into a ball at Mistress Simone’s feet, uncomfortably straddling the top step up to my bed and the floor in front of it.  

I don’t know for how long I cried, and I don’t know for how long Mistress Simone petted my hair and wouldn’t let me speak before I began to cry, but I was on the floor crying for what felt like a very long time.  I could not control my body, and I must have looked a fright with tears and snot when I finally did look up again to note that Mistress Simone was no longer sitting on my bed. I pushed myself up to look around and noticed Mistress Simone in the kitchen area, working on something as I glanced over to the clock to see that about an hour and a half had passed since she arrived at my door – significantly longer than I was expecting to find, even though it had felt like a long time to me.  In retrospect, I wonder if I didn’t fall asleep for a short time somewhere in between beginning to cry and looking to see Simone no longer above me.

I completed pushing myself up into a sitting position on the stairs where I could see well into the kitchen and my senses began to return to me.  I cleaned the snot and tears from my face as best I could with my hands and the ends of my shirt and focused my attention the smell, sound, and sights from my kitchen.

Mistress Simone was in my kitchen, cooking.  It was something that I never expected to see, and something that I would never see again.  She looked over at me and smiled – which was also something that I did not often see from her.

“It’s funny how the smell of breakfast food always seems to bring the attention of the exhausted and the forlorn,” she said in my general direction as she was plating the eggs that she had just been cooking and putting the mixing bowl and pan in the sink for me to clean later.

She pushed the plate across the island towards me and indicated it with her hand as she said, “Rant.  Eat.  Please. You need the calories and comfort.”

I wordlessly rose to walk over to the place she indicated, pulling a bar stool over to sit on as I did so.  I settled onto the chair and looked over at her, unsure of what I should be feeling, of whether or not I was doing the right things, worried that my emotional outburst was going to put me on the outs with her, thinking about three hundred different things all at once.

“Stop,” she said, reading the anguish on my face. “Just stop, Rant.   You have done well today. You have done extremely well.  I am pleased with you today, and I am certain that this will become easier for you with time.”

I instantly felt relief.  I was still emotionally raw, and I still did not really understand what it was that I was feeling or why I was crying the way that I was, but I did at least know, in that moment, that I had not displeased her or somehow screwed up, and that was enough.  The relief must have been obvious in my posture, face, and voice as I looked up again at Mistress Simone and asked her, “How did you know?”

“I wasn’t sure what to expect, honestly.  Every person is a little bit different. What you just went through was an intense experience to cap more than a week of increasingly intense experiences, and it would be surprising if you didn’t show any weakness anywhere along the way.”

That word.  Weakness.  It took the wind right out of my sails again, and it was probably evident in my posture because it was immediately rebuked in compassionate, but certain terms, “Rant. Stop.  You must not let every minor nit turn into a major upheaval. I gave you your kudos, and I will continue to do so for now, but while this episode was understandable and will be excused, you must not let yourself get carried so far away again, do you understand?”

“Yes, Mistress.”

“Now eat your eggs.  I’m not much of a cook, and I can count the number of times I’ve cooked for a man – my husband included – on the fingers of one hand still, but you have performed very well and I am very proud of you and you deserve something special.”

“Thank you, Mistress,” I said with ecstasy as I began to dig in to my eggs.  It was only then that I recognized that there was no other plate; that Mistress Simone had cooked for me in my own kitchen, and only for me.  It was not that she intended to eat and was allowing me to have the surplus of her portion, she was doing this as a service to me, and it felt strange and wonderful all at once.  

The eggs were not particularly good – simply scrambled with some salt and pepper, but the method in which they were delivered ensured that they were among the very best that I had ever had.

“These are delicious, Mistress,” I said, with complete honesty.

“I do expect flattery and devotion, pet, but I will not tolerate dishonesty – you are not being dishonest with me, are you, toy?”  she asked me, with just a hint of a smirk.

“Oh, no!  I swear, Mistress!  I don’t even like eggs, and these are amazing!”

“You don’t like eggs, and yet, these are amazing?”

“Yes, Mistress.”

“It’s a good thing that you’re adorable, Rant, because sometimes the shit that comes out of your mouth is just completely unbelievable.”

“Mistress?”

“Nevermind.  It is not important.  I am pleased that you are enjoying them, and more pleased that you are eating them.”

“Yes, Mistress.”

“Please be sure to drink lots of water,” she said as she grabbed a glass and filled it from the tap to place in front of me, “and do not get used to this sort of treatment.  I expected you to have an emotional reaction, and you did. I expected you to do well with Mary, and by her accounts, you did – though we will talk later about what you should and should not reveal to my clients.  I expected you to be just as you are, and I was not disappointed.” She said the last with an air of finality to it that left me feeling a little off-balance.

“Thank you, Mistress,” was all I finally managed to get out, after what was probably too long a period of time to be comfortable for either of us.

At this, Mistress Simone gathered herself up, stood taller – though I had not noticed that she was not keeping her normal, extremely rigid posture until just this point – and looked me square in the eyes with the largely unemotional gaze to which I became accustomed.

“I will leave the dishes for you to do, Rant.  I am glad that I was able to give you this time after your client today, but this is not likely to be something that can happen again.  You will need to be able to be resilient and care for yourself moving forward. Do you understand, Rant?”

“Yes, Mistress.”

“Good,” she said as she walked to the door, grasping the handle and looking back at me before opening the door.  “You really did do well today, toy. Keep this up, and I foresee a long and fruitful partnership.”

“Thank you, Mistress,” I beamed at her as she opened the door and disappeared behind it.

I sat there, on the barstool, in front of an empty plate and an empty water glass for quite some time, examining the thoughts and feelings and visuals that played themselves over and over again in my mind, wondering at the sort of partnership that Mistress Simone was speaking of, and wondering at my own emotions and whether or not I could continue to do this.  But ultimately, I decided that I could – I could do anything – for her.

I still don’t really know what possessed me to do so, but I pulled all the bedding off of my bed and slept in it on the floor that night.  I remember waking early in the morning hours, having forgotten to close the blinds the night before and with the glare of morning coming in.  I remember feeling like I was completely alone in the world, with no one beside me apart from Simone – but in that moment, that felt right, comfortable, even good.

My schedule was clear for that day, but that would be the last day that I had to myself for a very long time afterwards.

 

Words have power

My life is awesome.

What appears below the fold, after this entry (and now encapsulated as a part of it), is a piece of writing that I first posted to my fetlife account about five months ago.

In it, I recount a rather simple change in the way that I interact with the world.  I literally changed one phrase that I commonly uttered to another phrase that had exactly the same meaning in my own mind, but where the words that I used to express it were different – in a rather fundamental way.

Think of this as the update that I hinted at with the original fetlife post – and a way for those of you who do not know me on fetlife to catch up to an important change in the ways that I perceive and interact with the world.

Six months ago, when my friends would ask me, “Rant – how are you doing?”  my response would likely have been, “I’m alive.”

Six months ago, when my friends would remark on how well things appeared to be going for me, I would agree with them, but I would say, “Yeah, my life doesn’t suck.”

Six months ago, my trademark method of self-expression was to use understatement as a means of conveying my real feelings.  If I were to ever say something like, “It’s better than a sharp stick in the eye,” what I would really mean is, “It’s fucking amazing.”

It was an inside joke.  It was a ‘clever’ way to express myself without overextending myself.  I felt like those that really knew me would know the difference, and it would mean that I was somehow at least understood a little bit by a small number of people in a way that is not obvious to the uninitiated, and for some reason, that was important to me.

But, fuck, was it a limitation on how awesome my life could really get… and that was something that I completely failed to anticipate.

In the past several months, I’ve taken that narrative and completely rewritten it.

When my friends ask, “Rant – how are you doing?” I emphatically reply, “My life is awesome!”  and I mean it.  

When my friends remark on how well things are going for me, I don’t respond with, “Yeah, my life doesn’t suck.”  Instead, I say, “Yeah, I know! My life is fucking amazing!” and I mean it.

Oh sure, I have off days.  Today is kind of an off day.  Life has been keeping me very busy, and while 90% of those things are wonderful (at least for me) and I would not trade places with anyone I know or even that I know of, not every day is perfect.  

I wish I had more time to write.

I wish I could finish Part 8 of My Personal Journey (and Part 9, and 10, and however many more parts it will take to finish).  I wish I had time to compose the follow-up to my piece on subspace that I’ve been tinkering with for years. I wish I had time to write general responses to some of the questions that I receive in email rather than just barely keeping up with responding within a week or so on an individual basis.  I wish I had time to finish the novel that I have decided to complete and try to get published before the end of next year. But the things that keep me away from doing the things that I want to are just some of the most amazing and wonderful things I could ask for…

I am living a life of embarrassing riches in terms of love and joy.  I have the respect and support of dozens of people in personal, romantic, and professional capacities.  People want to be around me.  

This is not exactly new – but my previous self-deprecating behavior was serving as a barrier to forming new connections and standing in the way of expanding or strengthening those that existed.  My confidence and competence were always there, but my demeanor was standoffish or aloof or even anti-social and it was limiting me in ways that I didn’t even understand.

Words have power.

I’ve known this for a long time.  I’m a writer, after all.  And even before I could recognize that, I always had the capacity to be persuasive and elicit responses in the people with whom I would interact should I choose to make the effort – I just rarely did… and I have no idea why.

Perhaps I was afraid of rejection – that was certainly at least part of the problem.  While I’ve always had reasonably high self esteem – years of social pressure to be like someone I am not turned me into a bitter and angry man at points of my life, and even when I thought I was out from under the weight of those things, when I thought that the stark depression that kept me holed up inside my house for days at a time was gone for good, I was still not realizing my potential because I was holding back.  I was holding back with my actions, and I was holding back with my words, and I was holding back with my emotions.

Deciding to never hold anything back any longer and believing that I have the power to overcome any awful thing that life might throw at me, and then proving it to myself, over and over again, with everyday annoyances and life-shattering realizations, was the thing that opened the world to me.

I am living my on my terms now – and part of the reason for that was really just as simple as choosing more carefully the words that I say.

It’s been awhile since I’ve said it, but I am Rant.

This was neither a rant nor a story nor a lesson, and it may be ultimately nothing more than a piece of mildly masturbatory self-praise, but it is my truth for now, and my life is awesome.

What follows is the text of the original fetlife post.  There are reasons why I won’t link from here to there, but I will likely repost this to fetlife as well and link there to here.  Feel free to drop me an email if you’d like to understand the reasons why or if you’d just like to let me know that personal stories like this are something you actually care to read – or use the comment form below.  

I will find a way to carve out more time for Part 8 soon – do not despair.

Until then – I remain…

 – Rant


My life does not suck.

It’s a mantra… almost a catch-phrase. It’s a common part of my personal vernacular, and it’s undoubtedly true. I use it to express pleasure.

But words have meaning, you know?

My life does not suck is the thing that I tell my friends when I am happy.

I say My life does not suck when I realize that the choices I have made have led me to a place, or a person, or an event where I feel at home.

But a friend recently pointed out to me that there is a kernel buried deep within that phrase – that it conveys doubt or uncertainty.

At first I blew him off – I don’t mean anything bad by the phrase, I see it as a refutation of a state that feels unpleasant. I see it as a positive affirmation of my choices and direction.

But words have meaning, you know?

Yesterday, before meditating, this was one of the last thoughts to pass through my mind. An offhand comment at a party where I had a hard time hearing over the din led to days of percolating thoughts and introspection.

I kind of love it when things like that happen.

They give me a chance to see the things that are hidden from my attention, but that have an effect on me, my presentation to the world, and even how I see myself at a subconscious level.

To say My life does not suck is the bare minimum above My life sucks.

Does this mean that I am afraid, most of the time, that my life does suck?

I do often feel misplaced, like I don’t fit anywhere, like no one will ever really understand me. This community accepts me, but still does not understand me. The moments when I feel like I belong are few and far between, but I fake it as best I can.

Am I contributing to that feeling with the words that I use, even if the meaning is completely distinct in my own mind?

I’m still not sure, but while my life does not suck, from now on I think I am going to say My life is awesome! instead – even when I am not feeling quite that strongly that it does.

We shall soon see what difference, if any, this makes…

 

I am easy to love, but I am challenging to be in love with.

These are the confessions of a powerful polyamorous slut.

I am happy. I am in complete control of my life and I cannot foresee anything that might change that. I feel competent to deal with anything that life can throw at me.

I have grown and changed every year of my life, and I have been proud of the man I am for some time now, but I still discover new things about myself and sometimes those things are significant.

Struck by this realization as I was, it slipped into place so easily that I recognize this as something that I have known for some time but masked from my own perception.

I am easy to love, but I am very challenging to be in love with.

I am open and caring and honest and innocent and eager and overwhelming and arrogant and selfish and demanding and safe and nurturing and horny and wicked and brutal and oh-so-fucking-smart, and I do not hold back on any of these things.

When I am in love with you, the world ceases to exist when you are in my presence. You become the focus of all of the attention I can bring to bear.

I will be open and caring and honest and innocent and eager and overwhelming and arrogant and selfish and demanding and safe and nurturing and horny and wicked and brutal to you.

I am happy, and if you were in love with me, you would be too.

But I am an unrepentant slut.

I am easy to love, because I love so very easily, and honestly, and completely.

And when you are in love with me, this will be challenging.

I will make you feel special, because you are special.

I will make you feel happy, because it is difficult to be unhappy around someone who is so very happy themselves. Misery loves company, but it hates competition.

I will make the things that you despise about yourself okay and I will make the things that you love about yourself super-powers.

I will focus all of my unbridled enthusiasm right at you and I’ll use it to mold you into what I desire.

I will convince you that you are the most important person in my universe, all the while telling you about how I feel the very same way about someone else in my past, present, or future.

Time itself will take on special properties when I am around.

And then I will leave.

Not forever. Not even for more than is necessary, but it will still be difficult.  I will return, because this wasn’t an ending – there are no endings in my life anymore – but the distances of space and time will be painful.

You will remember that all of those things that I made you feel – I am making someone else feel some of the times that you are not around.

And it will all feel like a lie.

But nothing was false. Nothing was untrue. Everything that you felt was real, and continues to be real in my mind – forever.

I am easy to love because I love you already.

I am challenging to be in love with because I love openly, fearlessly, and it will not always be directed at you.

But I will never stop loving you – I never have.

 

 

My Personal Journey : Part 7

To my readers: I apologize for the length of this piece.  I normally try to keep my entries to near 1000 words, and I began with the intent to do so this time as well, but as the story developed on the page I found that I could not tell it with so few words and so I chose to cull far less than I normally do.  

***

I have never lived in as nice of a place as I did when I was with Simone.  I have no idea how much such a place cost, but it was well beyond my means at the time and is almost certainly beyond my means now – though it would also be impractical today for a number of other reasons.  

It was a very modern loft style studio apartment.  There actually was a small loft area reachable via a staircase that was above the entryway of the apartment, but walking in the first thing you would see is the kitchen island, then the windows, then the St. Andrews cross in one corner, a telescope in the other corner, a dining table and chairs,  a small sitting area with a love seat, overstuffed chair and a low coffee table, and a raised dais upon which was a massive (though not as large as my current) bed.

It was a really nice kitchen – I wish that I had had the confidence and knowledge of how to cook back then because I’m certain that I could have made some very nice meals in that kitchen, and probably could have provided even yet another service to my clients, although in all honesty most of my appointments were too short for that to be viable.

However, my very first appointment was to be for a duration of four hours.  I was more than a little nervous about this. What am I supposed to do for four hours?  I mean, I was young and in great shape and athletic enough to know how to be at peak performance, but four hours is a long time and I was envisioning trying to actually be physically active for that entire time and not only finding the duration daunting, but I was not at all sure that I would be creative enough to fill that much time, and I like to think that I’m pretty creative.

Every client that I saw was scheduled through Simone’s office.  This was both a good thing and a bad thing at various times. It was a good thing because everyone that I saw was a known quantity – vetted and approved by Simone or someone on staff, they tracked my schedule and made sure that I was never overbooked, but they often left me literally no time for myself.  I never had clients scheduled closer than an hour apart, but because of the nature of the business, not everyone leaves precisely on time, and late arrivals have an expectation of being allowed to make up that time on the back end. However, there was a protocol in place to deal with these sorts of things, with the aim of accommodating a certain level of uncertainty baked into the process.  For clients that I would see away from my apartment (outcalls) there was a different procedure, but for clients that I would see in my own apartment (incalls) – which was the vast majority –  there was a security door with a buzz-through system for the building. Clients would know to buzz me and give a certain name and then I would buzz them in and meet them at my door as would be appropriate for the appointment.

Before each client – time permitting – I was given a dossier of sorts on the client, any special requests, known preferences, and a little bit of personal information about them as a way to relate and have something to talk about.  Despite the obvious and intensely personal nature of the visits, most people are not completely comfortable just jumping into sex right away with someone that they known nothing about apart from some pictures and a little bit of back story.  Of course – some are… 

In the information that Simone gave me about my first client, Mary (which wasn’t her real name), she said that this was one of her best clients and a personal friend besides, and I was to give her anything that she wanted.   She had interest in horses, travel, fine wines, and finding new young artists. Well, at least I knew something about horses, and I thought I knew something about wine too – but it turns out that some wines are made outside of California, and I was not very familiar with anything else at the time.

Mary was not a Domme, and had some interest in kinky play, but was mostly interested in very physical sex acts – the more physical the better.   I was to act in a confident and physical manner with her, but not to command her to do anything or to engage in any sort of non-sexual play. She liked to be taken, but only on her terms.  Even more than that though, she liked to be aggressive herself and have that met with equal aggression. I was to be deferential while simultaneously making her feel like I was not.

How the fuck was I supposed to do that?

In the hour or so that I had before she was set to arrive I think I must have walked every inch of floor in that apartment, adjusted the music that I was playing about 20 different times, trying to figure out what sort of music would best accompany physical sexual acts with someone who I knew next to nothing about – not even how she looked.

With the exception of regular clients who would return multiple times, this was often something that I would have to contend with as I waited for a new client to arrive.  They all knew exactly what I looked like, of course, having picked out my profile in a catalog of such things that Simone kept, but I rarely had any idea what they would look like and the amount of information that I was given about Mary was generally greater than I would see in most cases.  

Attraction, being what it is, would mean that in some cases, I would be worried that I would not be able to perform to the client’s satisfaction – and prior to sitting there in my anxiety around meeting my first client, this was not something that had ever occurred to me.

Would I be able to get it up?  Or perhaps even worse – what if I couldn’t keep it up when I needed to?  Having already been on the receiving end of punishment from Simone, I could only begin to imagine how things might go if I were to fail to perform as required.  There were some things that were available to me to help with this, but I would not find that out until later and for this occasion, I was left very much in the dark.

As I was pondering my potential failure to perform, my phone rang – which I was certain was from the buzzing at the door and I looked at the clock to try to understand how the time had passed so quickly and I realized that I should still have 20 minutes, so I picked up the phone and spoke with more question in my voice than anything else.

“Hello?”

“Rant.  Mary will be there soon.  Are you ready?” Simone’s clear, concise, and somewhat cold voice came through strongly and I must have verbally exhaled my apprehension because she followed up immediately with, “Kneel for me.  Now.” To which I responded by getting on my knees.

“Rant – are you there?”

“Yes, Mistress.”

“Are you kneeling?”

“Yes, Mistress.”

“Are you breathing?”

“Yes, Mistress.”

“Tell me ‘no’ so that I know your brain is still working.”

“No, Mistress.”

“What did you just say to me?  Are you allowed to use that word with me, Rant?”

“No, Mistress.  I mean, yes, wait… are you trying to make me more nervous?”

“<soft chuckle> No… Mary does enjoy intimidating her partners sometimes, but I want her to like you and she’s not going to respect you unless you give back everything that she dishes out.  Can you do that, Rant? She will not make it easy for you.”

“Yes, Mistress.” I said, but I was much more nervous than the words that I spoke.

“Good boy.  Now do me proud.”

“Yes, Mistress.”

<click>

I held the phone receiver in my hand and knelt on the floor for about a minute more, until the loud cycling tone to alert me to it being left off the hook began, which shifted me out of my reverie and made me realize that if I didn’t put the receiver back down, the door buzz would not come through and I could be in big trouble.

I had to stand again to replace the phone receiver, but once I’d done so, I decided to kneel again, thinking about everything that had come to pass to that point.

It was one of the more nerve wracking things to have happened in my life.

What seemed to be at the same time an eternity and merely a moment later, my phone rang again and I looked at the clock again and confirmed what I already knew to be the case – it was time for Mary to arrive.

“Hello?”

“Hello – I’m looking for Rant.” spoke a very pleasant sounding female voice.

I’d been told what to respond.  “You have found him. Please come up.”  I pressed the ‘*’ key on the phone, heard the tone, and then hung up the receiver as I walked over to unlock and stand near the door.

A few moments later, I could hear the steps on the walkway outside my door and I tried to look through the frosted glass near the entrance, but only saw colors moving and then remembered the peephole in the door and looked through to see a distorted image of a gorgeous woman walking towards my door.

I stepped back just before she began to raise her hand to knock on the door.  I recall internal conflict as I tried to decide whether or not it would be a good thing to open the door in advance of her knock, but ultimately the decision to let her knock and the inaction of trying to make a decision coalesced and I heard:

<knock knock>  confident, not tentative in the least…

…it was enough to cause me to hesitate further, but eventually I pulled myself out of my head and opened the door.

On the other side of the door I saw one of the more beautiful women I have encountered in my life.  She was tall, but still shorter than I am, athletic, busty, blonde, and she had the biggest brown eyes I’ve ever seen.  Her makeup was understated but worked to alter her apparent facial structure, which was rounder than she probably would have liked.  She reminded me a great deal of Drew Barrymore in her appearance, and she was wearing a short sundress and sandals: periwinkle with white polka dots.

I suspect that she was looking me over in much the same way that I was her, because she stood for a moment in the doorway just looking at me, and I quickly realized that I was both blocking her way and had failed to invite her in as yet, so I quickly moved to the side and gestured into my apartment with my arm as I said, “Please, do come in.”  She moved past me, and I closed the door, turning to walk past her and into the open space of the apartment.

It requires a little bit of mental gymnastics to recall details of that day, but when I do, I am continually surprised at how immature I was in my sexual expression.  The mainstays of my sexual expression today – raw physicality, breath play, growling, biting – were mere shadows of what they are today.  Mary actually helped me to develop these skills. She was hardly the only one – and I have gone through periods of contraction again since then – but I will always have something of a special place for her in my pantheon of elder sex gods.

I could see and feel the hunger in her eyes.  I felt invigorated by it.  All anxiety that I had about being unable to perform was instantly gone as my own sex drive engaged again and I began to mentally undress the woman in front of me.

She stepped further inside and maneuvered herself to position me between her and the kitchen island and then she started to advance on me.  It did not happen quickly, but she did it with such fluid predatory movement that I was still caught off guard and allowed her to get much closer than I realized, backing me into the kitchen island as she approached.

Her look was playful and predatory at the same time.  She casually reached up and touched me on the chest, following her arm with her body, pressing herself into me, pushing me into the island behind me, and then she reached down and grabbed my cock through my slacks. 

I’m pretty sure that I twitched.  I liked it, but I twitched nonetheless.

I hadn’t yet started wearing waistcoats as much as I do now, and I was not wearing a jacket, but I was wearing a collared shirt and tie – Windsor knot.  I don’t know if the Eldredge knot had been invented yet, but I was unaware of its existence, in any rate.

Mary reached up and grabbed my tie in her left hand while keeping her right on my cock, which was quite obviously stiff under the thin fabric of my slacks and the boxers that I was wearing underneath.  She pulled on my tie, attempting to bring my face to hers for a kiss, which I was instantly ready to meet when it occurred to me that she had still not uttered a single word since she appeared at my door.

So struck was I by this realization that I straightened up, looking beyond her into the distance to parse the thoughts that were coming into my mind.  This had the effect of pulling me up and away from her mouth, which was still closing in on me. She mistook my gesture as playing coy – thought that I was dodging her advance – and she responded by chuckling slightly and dipping to close her teeth on the skin at the base of my neck and then she purred into me, biting lightly and quickly disengaging.

“I’ve had my eye on you for awhile, Rant…” she spoke in low tones, huskiness behind her words.

“I haven’t been here long…”

“It’s been more than a week since I last saw you.”

I was confused, and the look was probably pretty obvious on my face.  I hadn’t ever met Mary before… and then it occurred to me – she was one of the women in the restaurant with Simone when I first encountered her.  Mary was the one who had her hand on the inside of my thigh when I was telling them about the ranch that I grew up on in an effort to get a better tip.

“I suggested to Simone that she recruit you, you know?”

“You did?”

“Yes – and she was so grateful that she let me break you in.. at a discount.”

“Wait.. what?”

“Why did you think she hasn’t fucked you yet?”

“But she has… ”

“HA!  I knew it!”  she interrupted me with glee in her voice and she literally jumped back to do a little dance.

“I don’t understand…”

“Oh hush, honey… I promise that I will be gentle with you, since this will be your first time…”

“My first time for what?” I am sure that I looked about as confused as I’ve ever been.

“Kneel.”  It was a command, not a request, and I responded almost automatically, facing Mary and then dropping to my knees without a word and staring at the floor in front of her feet with my hands behind my back.

“Good boy – well… that was almost good.”

I continued to stare at the floor in front of her feet and she began to walk towards me.  In my peripheral vision, I could see her pulling her dress up over her head and I desperately wanted to look up at her and see what she was wearing under that dress – along with what I imagined to be vast stretches of gorgeous, naked skin, but I knew what was expected of me and kept my eyes on the floor.

“Do you not want to see my body, Rant?”  her voice was slightly mocking and I forgot my place and looked up to see a very beautiful, and with the exception of her sandals, a very naked Mary, standing with all of her weight on one foot so that she could bend the other one in front of her as she pulled her arms up into her hair, bringing her breasts up as she did so – looking every bit the pinup as she did so.

I think I opened my mouth to start to say something, but the words would not come…

“Oh, but that’s not being a good boy, is it, Rant?”

I didn’t move or make a sound – my brain had hit a sort of vapor-lock. 

She walked up towards me, and I kept my eyes locked on her body, but it looked like she was smiling in my peripheral vision as she closed in on me and then grabbed my head behind my head, threading her fingers into my hair and thrusting her pelvis forward, grinding my face into her abdomen, and then she let go with one hand and lifted one of her legs, thrusting her pussy right into my face, putting her knee up on the edge of the island that was still behind me.

A low growl began to form in my throat, unbidden and unfamiliar to me at that time, but I opened my mouth and hungrily accepted her thrusts, meeting with my tongue.

She shifted back a bit to give her more angle and began fucking my face, pressing the back of my head back against the island behind me, so that I could not get away from her.

I was in heaven for those first few moments.  She was running her pussy over my whole face, grinding on the bridge of my nose, coming back to my tongue, and I was enjoying every moment of it, but then she started to get rougher, bumping her pelvis into my skull, trying to bounce it off of the island behind me.  I was still on my knees with my hands behind me and was pushed back into the island, leaning back from my ankles, which were in front of my center of gravity. I was being held up by the pressure on the back of my head, and she was exploiting that to keep me off balance and toy with me.  Then she started to giggle and she brought her leg and arm back down, stood on her toes, and with me still off balance, straddled me with her legs, grabbed the hair at the top of my head in both of her hands and pulled hard, while grinding her pussy into my nose – laughing all the while.

The growl that had been in throat stopped and I started having a hard time catching a breath and was beginning to reach panic when I realized that I was not bound, was nearly twice Mary’s size, and fully clothed still, so I brought my arms up from behind me, dislodging myself from within Mary’s legs, grabbed her by the waist and lifted her off of me as I started to stand.  

She tried to move back away from me and fell back onto her ass as I stood, and I thought I saw fear in her eyes for a moment, but then she was in control of herself again, drawing her legs up and pivoting on to her feet.

“Now that’s what I came for, Rant!”  She gave me a smoldering look as I was undoing my tie.

She threw out her hand in a ‘stop’ gesture and exclaimed, “No! Leave the tie.  Take off the shirt, but leave the tie.”

I looked at her evenly, hearing what she said but having no desire to comply.  It was only then that I realized that I was growling again. I slid the tie over my head and while looking Mary directly in the eye, I threw it to the ground behind me and started walking towards her.

I was trying to be menacing, and I think I might have succeeded a little bit, but I ruined it by trying to be like the macho guys you see on TV and rip open my shirt by the buttons, but it proved much more difficult than I expected and I managed to get it free only after a few inglorious tugs and some grunting.

Mary was either being charitable, or my grunting and struggling was intimidating enough that she had the grace to not laugh at me as I was still walking towards her, but she had removed her sandals and was back on her feet.   She took a step backwards, and then turned and fled, giggling as she did so.

She ran across the room and up the steps, jumping on my bed and turning to face me on all fours with a wide grin her face, laughing the whole time.

I was not laughing.

I kept walking towards her at the same pace, growling all the while and she once again held up her hand and said more firmly this time, “No.  Go get the tie and put it back on. I want something to hold on to.”

I heard the words.   I knew I should obey them.  I was not in the right mind to do so, so I growled at her instead and threw my arms out to the sides of my body while pushing my chest out.

Much more firmly this time, she spoke again, “No, Rant.  Go get the tie and put it on and then take off your pants.”

I came back to myself, remembered my place, stood tall and hung my head towards her, while saying as meekly as I could manage in that moment, “Yes, Mistress.” and then I went over and got the tie, picked it up, looped it back around my neck and cinched it tight, stepped out of my shoes, and then I took off my pants and stood there, bowing towards Mary.

“I meant those pants too, Rant.” Mary said, indicating my boxers.

Understanding what she meant for me to do, I reached down and took off my socks, then took off my boxers and stood again, bowing towards Mary.

“What happened to that hard cock you were sporting through those slacks just moments ago, Rant?” Mary’s voice was dripping with contempt as she indicated my semi-flaccid penis.

My initial reaction was to feel shame, but I’d been taught already to turn that around, embracing the situation as it is and knowing that it will bring pleasure to my Top, so I smiled and meant to say something like, “If it would please Mistress, I will do my best to summon what meager cock I have for her pleasure.”  but what actually came out was, “It was momentarily fooled into thinking that some thing worth fucking was nearby…” and my voice was dripping with contempt of my own.

Mary’s smile could have split her face as she rotated her hips to bring her feet around to the side of the bed and stood up, walking over to me to – completely without preamble – slap me across the face harder than I’d been slapped by anyone prior to that point, Simone included.  Then she grabbed me by the front of throat and pulled herself into me to kiss me passionately. I was confused and aroused and leaned into it, getting hard as a rock as I did so.

She let go, dropped back onto her feet and favored me with a look that said “I like this” and then she turned to walk back towards the bed and climb back up again, turning over onto her back and then to face me, knees bent, spread-eagle.

“Now, if you don’t get over here and fuck me with that nice, hard cock that I see right there, I’m going to have Simone cut it off and bronze it so that I can use it as a dildo.”

I growled at her, snapped my jaw in the air, and stalked over to the bed, putting my knee directly between her legs and then covering her with my body, putting my hand on her throat and growling in her ear as I did so.

She smiled, grabbed the arm that was attached to the hand that was on her neck, pulled it off of her – and I let her – and then she rotated her head like she was biting into an ear of corn and bit my forearm, hard.

I made an inelegant noise and snatched my arm back from her, pivoting back onto my knees to get away from her teeth, but she followed me, grabbing at me and trying to pull me down, but just lifting herself up instead.  I rotated my shoulder around and brought my arm over her, swatting her down to the bed, and then covered her throat again this time, and pushed, pushing her down into the mattress by her throat.  Her face went red instantly and I could see that I was hurting her.  I didn’t care.

Her eyes got wide and she started to beat at my arm with her own arms – a futile attempt, and I looked at her with derision and laughed.  Her eyes somehow got even wider and I let up, letting her gulp a huge breath of air, which she did, and then she launched herself at me, grasping at my head and pulling her face into me to give me frantic, desperate kisses, trying desperately to pull me down into the bed with her, into her.

Knowing what was required of me and coming to my senses again, I relented.

What followed was spectacularly rough sex, frantic moves to change position, followed by grasping and pinning and fucking – glorious fucking!  She pushed me, hit me, bit me, grinded on me, thrust onto me, and I pushed back, pinned her, bit her, thrust into her, grinded into her, pulled her hair, and she pulled mine.  We went at it like a couple of alley-cats, pulling the fitted sheets off of the mattress along with all of the other bedding, eventually to collapse in a heaving, sweaty pile upon piles of bedding and bare mattress.

Under an hour had passed by this time.  I was suddenly not very sure that I could keep this up for four hours.  

Fortunately for me, Mary was content to spend large swaths of time in between physical bouts with conversation.  She revealed to me much about her relationship with Simone, and the ways that I was being manipulated behind the scenes…

“So, when did Simone fuck you?”

“What?”

“When did Simone give in and fuck you?”

“Give in?”

“Ah, of course… she was supposed to save you for me.”

“What do you mean?”

“We made a bargain – she was not supposed to let you cum until you fucked me.  And I didn’t think she would be able to hold out, so we made a wager. If she fucked you first, then I would get this visit for free” and she twirled her hands in the air and lilted her voice as she said ‘free’, “but if I got to have you first, I owe her a bottle of Dom.  Far better deal for me, either way…”

“Wait, what?”  I can be a really smart guy sometimes.

“So when did it happen?  I bet it was last week, wasn’t it?”

“Uhm, no, it was about three hours ago.”

“What?! That bitch!

“Uh..”

“Well, she’s definitely paying for this now… and you want Simone to get her money’s worth, don’t you, Rant?”

“Yes, Mistress.”

We reenacted variations on the theme above three more times over the course of the next four hours, and in between we talked about horses, and wine, and astronomy – she wanted me to show her things through my telescope, but there was too much light for that…  I learned more about my Mistress and the people she associated with – trying to remember as much as I could – to be a better slave for my Mistress.

After Mary had left, my phone rang once again.

“Hello?”

“Rant.  How did it go?”

“I believe that it went well, Mistress.”

“I suspect you would know if it hadn’t… but I will confer with Mary – I’m sure that she will want to discuss things.  Is there anything that you need to confess before I hear the story from her?”

“Confess?”

“What was that, Rant?”

“Confess, Mistress?  I am a bit confused, Mistress.”

“Did you meet with her expectations?”

“I do believe so, Mistress.”

“How many times?”

“Four.” 

“Mistress,” I quickly added and hoped that omission would not draw attention.

“Well done.  Good boy. Your next client will be there in an hour.  Be ready.”

I was dumbfounded.  There was no way I would be ready for another client in an hour – I’d need longer than that just to clean the apartment, much less to get to the point of being able to have sex again, but I didn’t have much choice, and I loved that I didn’t have that choice then.  Suddenly, it didn’t seem so daunting after all…

“Yes, Mistress.  I will be ready.”

“Good boy.”

<click>

I sprang into action and did the best I could to quickly shower, put on nice clothes again (I needed a new shirt, obviously…) and make up the bed as quickly as possible.  It was hardly a perfect job, but it was not awful. I began to pace a bit as the implications of my new lifestyle were starting to coalesce in my mind, when the doorbell rang.

That was not the protocol.  I don’t think I even realized that I had a doorbell to that point.

I walked to the door and looked through the peephole, to see Mistress Simone on the other side.

I immediately flung the door open and dropped to my knees.

“Rant, move aside so that I can come in.”

I quickly shuffled to the side and she walked past me as I tried to turn on my knees to face her.

“Mistress, I am sorry…”

“Why are you sorry, Rant?”

“I do not know, Mistress.  I only was expecting to see .. not you .. and I fear that I have done something to displease you.”

“Mistress…”

“Mistress!  I fear that I have done something to displease you, Mistress.  I’m sorry, Mistress.”

“Rant. You did nothing wrong. Stand up and come over here with me…”  

She walked into the apartment, over to my bed, and sat on the edge, looking at me as I followed behind her like a scolded puppy.

“Well, how was it?”

….

Next time I’ll relate a story of Simone’s kindness and compassion.  So far you’ve only seen how hard she could be.

Until then – I remain Rant.

My Personal Journey : Part 6

Part 6:  What does it mean to be a slave?

Those of you who know me personally or who have been following along since before I began to recall my origins story may remember a bit of the relationship that Simone and I ultimately ended up having.  She did not exploit me in the same way that the members of the Lodge did, but she did exploit me nonetheless, and in a much more direct way.  The difference, of course, is that I consented to this treatment.

To this day, I do not know if Simone ever really cared for me or not.  She made gestures to indicate that she did at times, and she was incredibly cold and distant at other times, but it didn’t really matter in the beginning, because I was completely smitten.

The first week or so that I was Mistress Simone’s property was a panoply of new experiences for me, the details of which are burned into my mind, but that I really can not recall here without shifting my perception to the point of discomfort.  However, I can paint the broad strokes…

Over the course of several days, Mistress Simone set me up in an apartment, destroyed most of my old clothing and took me shopping to replace them with more suitable things, introduced me to several of her business associates, most of my companion chattel, and even a couple of prospective clients, though I did not know that was who they were at the time.

She introduced me to protocol, proper ways to show submission, posture, bearing, and many of the tools of the trade.  I did not know it at the time, but she was being careful not to mark me.  She taught me both the Top and bottom sides of each interaction, which I thought was completely normal at the time, but have come to understand is completely unique.  It was a whirlwind introduction to the things that would later be expected of me.

She spoke to me a great deal about sex.  She was very interested to hear about my sexual experiences with the Lodge, and I could tell that she was turned on by the ritualistic nature of things and the incorporation of sex as part of that.  I often had a difficult time accurately reading Simone, but I was absolutely certain of her interest in this.   She asked a great deal about my perceptions of various sexual activities, and whether or not I enjoyed doing those things with women or men.  I answered her honestly, though in many cases, I did not really understand the questions that I was answering.

She hit me and made me beg and stepped on me and let me perform cunnilingus on her, but she always stopped me before her orgasm.  I didn’t understand why then, and I’m not entirely sure that I do now. Whereas I was completely baffled then, I am pretty sure that I understand now.  It was a power play.  It was to show me how in control she was, and how – even as I learned what she liked and what she didn’t, becoming much more adept at the act – she maintained that control.

She would often command me to jack off for her, but she warned me that I was to ask her for permission to cum, and that if I were to ejaculate without permission that there would be severe consequences.   I always asked her for permission to cum, but she never gave it (until much later).   I made the mistake once of stopping after asking if I could cum and being told no – but I only made that mistake once.  I never did ejaculate without permission, but I did occasionally become sore.

She spent several hours with me each day.  I felt extremely special.  I could tell that the others were jealous of the attention that I would get, but I would occasionally overhear things like, “he’s just new, the shininess will wear off soon,” or “wait until he pulls his first job and falls flat on his face,” but those things just raised my competitive spirit and furthered my isolationist tendencies – Simone became my entire world.

The psychology of her pitch was impeccable.  She knew that she had me wrapped around her little finger.  I felt like a million bucks, even when I was prostrate on the floor naked for her, licking the bottom (yes, the part that contacts the ground…) of her shoes.  She put me in fancy clothes and a fancy apartment and was introducing me to important people.  It really didn’t matter to me that much that I was getting no actual sex from this – I felt important again, special, unique.  And once I felt all of those things, and I’d been divorced from contact with everyone else in my life, and I was completely and utterly dependent upon her, she told me what she really wanted me to do.

She wanted me to be a prostitute.

I’m not an idiot, and I had picked up along the way that this was what was actually going on behind the scenes, though there were also legitimate photography gigs and convention postings that were happening as well, but I already knew that the core of her business was in the sex trade, and the women that I had seen her dining with when I first encountered her were clients of hers more than friends – and she knew many such women.  She even conducted events specifically targeted at this demographic – sex toy events, wine and cheese events,  anything that would get the abandoned wives of Beverly Hills together…  Her male clients required significantly less maintenance or cost of customer acquisition, but they were also significantly less reliable.  Female clients were almost always return clients…  these were the people to whom I was intended to appeal.

Forewarned of this eventuality, and fully enamored of my new life, I did not hesitate to agree, though in retrospect, I realize that I really did not have much of a choice.   Simone rewarded me with what was at that time the most intense sexual experience of my life.  She was Dominant with me in a way that appealed to me then, but that would result in very different reactions from me now, but she fucked the shit out of me, and while she ordered me to do things to her, she also just used me in ways that still make me pause… and then when she was done, she told me to disappear and clean myself up because I would be seeing my first client in just a few hours.

I was simultaneously excited and about as anxious as I have ever been.

To be continued in Part 7…

My Personal Journey : Part 5

Part 5: A radioactive spider-bite of BDSM goodness

My previous entry ended with the dissolution of my first marriage, my attempt at nomadic existence, and a mad scramble for how to survive in a world where I did not have a mission any longer.

I was, by this time, a graduate of several bachelors programs and fully qualified to seek employment in several potentially lucrative career paths, but I was aimless and adrift and in need of a way to support myself right now – having never lived with uncertainty before, so I took literally the first job I could find with the notion of finding something better while I was working.  That job happened to be as a server at The Cheesecake Factory in Brentwood, California.  Not the city of Brentwood, which is far to the east of where I live now, but the unincorporated area of Los Angeles referred to as Brentwood that sits between the cities of Beverly Hills and Santa Monica.   To call it an affluent neighborhood would be an understatement.

Surrounded by wealth, living without direction, unsure of where I’d be sleeping for the night and hating the fact that a free meal was one of the major selling points for taking the job, I was desperate to find something that would give meaning to my existence again.  I was enrolled in medical school, but I had stopped attending classes, and having lived with a long runway for my entire life – every step was planned, by my own ambition or by those who would see me fulfill visions of their own – I did not know what to do with myself and I didn’t know how to find my own way.

I worked in the day, drank heavily at night, and I became something of a bar rat.  I hate to admit this about myself, but I started to fall back into old patterns of thought and I started viewing people as a means to an end rather than individuals again.  I used the desperate and lonely as a way to have a place to sleep for the night and not have to sleep in my car yet again.   I began to see society as something that I could exploit and all plans for the future fell away as I started living moment-to-moment, selfish and alone.

And yet – despite the rapidly descendant conditions of living that I was abruptly dropped into, I remained competent, preternaturally charming, and sharp as a bone saw.  This resulted in my rapid advancement to the night shift, which while it did bring in larger tips, somewhat diminished my ability to use my charm and wit to secure lodging, so I was leaning more heavily on friends and that did not sit particularly well with me, though I’m not sure why it should feel worse to stay with people who cared for me than those who did not even know me, but that was where I was at that time.

One evening, I had a table with three older women – I say older women because at the time I was in my early 20’s and they were probably all in their mid to late thirties… I suppose I should properly say that I thought of them as cougars, though the term didn’t have that meaning at the time.  They were into their wine to the tune of a bottle apiece and the actual food that they had consumed was pretty light.  They were quite loose with their volume and the content of their conversation… they were all sharing stories of things that they had recently done with their boy-toys, and regaling in the schadenfreude of doing so right under the noses of their husbands.

My moral compass at the time was a little wonky, and to my mind, the stories that I was hearing sounded drastically more appealing than the life that I was living, so I turned my charm and wit into a weapon once again and I began to shamelessly flirt with the women at that table.  I came back to check on them often, moving closer than was strictly necessary, and inviting the touch that I was sure would come – and I was not disappointed.

It was not long before I was telling them my life story, standing at the side of one who had her arm wrapped around my leg while another patted my abdomen or forearm with every other sentence she spoke and the third just sat across the table from me, easy in her seat, eyes burning a hole in my soul.  They were all attractive, but this woman across the table, Simone, was a goddess.  She had a light olive complexion and stunning ice-blue eyes with pure white, long, straight hair.   Her body was lithe and firm, her tits were clearly fake, but not out of proportion with her frame.  She looked like a Patrick Nagel print in negative, brought to life.  But it was the look she gave me that haunted me.

They all seemed to love to hear the story of the country boy who grew up on horseback who was coming to the big city to go to medical school.  They all seemed to want me, not just for my body -which I was quite proud of at the time – but for my story.  They thought me a wholesome and eager, naive young man.  I did not tell them of the Lodge or the fact that the reason I knew this was a compelling story was because I had been honing it night after night for the past month, going after smaller scores.  But something about Simone struck me, and it’s clear to me now that she saw right through me from the very beginning.

Soon it came time for them to leave, and I was by now dodging the harsh stares of my manager anyway, so I was glad to see that they were wrapping things up, but hopeful that this would not be the last I saw of them.  I prepared the check for them and wrote my first name and phone number on the customer copy, placed it in the folio and then walked to their table.  I did not know who among them was to pay the tab, but I presented it to Simone without hesitation – it was really her that I wanted to see the note I’d left.

She gave me her credit card without looking at the bill, and I suppressed the dejected feeling that I have to admit that I felt and took her card back to run it, putting the original note on top of the receipt for her to sign and her credit card, then returned and handed the closed folio to her.  She accepted it, looked inside, pulled out her card and signed the receipt and then handed it all back to me before I could get away.

Certain that my ploy had failed, I took out the customer copy of the receipt that she’d left behind and I crumpled it into the trash.  I finished up the night without much else to speak of, and then spent the night on my friend’s couch once again, certain that I would never see any of them again but still dreaming of the might-have-beens that came with the idea.

You can imagine my surprise when I received a call the next morning.  This was in an era before smartphones, but caller-id was still ubiquitous on the small displays of cell phones of the time and this showed up as “Silver Screen Partners”.  I had no idea what to expect, but I was not expecting what followed.

“Hello Rant, this is Simone.  Do you know who I am?”

I really was not expecting to hear from her, but I did know – immediately –  so I didn’t hesitate, “Yes, I believe I do.”

“Excellent.  I would like you to come to my office for a job interview this afternoon – can you manage that?”

“Wait – now I’m not so sure I do know…”

“Your hearing is not poor, I assume?”

“No.”

“Then you should not doubt it.  Can you make the meeting?  2pm – ” and she gave me an address.

“Yes. I can do that,” I replied, even though I knew it would mean skipping class yet again.

“Good.  Do not be late, and bring your headshots if you have them.”

Now, I had never had any plans of attempting to be an actor or a model, but I did live in LA and work in a restaurant, so I knew what she was asking for, but I did not have any photos of myself, let alone professional headshots.

“Uh, I don’t have any…”

“That’s fine.  Come anyway.  Dress well.”

“Okay, I will be there.”

“Excellent.”  <click>

There was no click, really… phones don’t do that anymore and didn’t even then, but somehow we still get the foley for it in TV shows…

I did my best to make myself presentable, not knowing what to expect.

I arrived at Simone’s building about 15 minutes early, afraid to be late, and I walked into her office lobby to be greeted by a beautiful young lady with visible tattoos on nearly every inch of skin that I could see, and I could see quite a bit of it.  She instructed me to sit and wait and that she’d take me to see Simone – “when Mistress is ready.”

I was a bit less worried about my appearance after seeing Pepper (whose name I would learn later, but it makes it easier to refer to her as such now) – but I was still a bit concerned about it, it was a cheap two-piece suit that fit me poorly, and I was not very comfortable in nice clothes at that time of my life.

Eventually Pepper asked me to follow her, so I did.  I walked into Simone’s office for the first time and was greeted by Simone at the front of her desk, wearing a floor-length diaphanous gown with slits in the sleeves and up the legs and nothing else underneath.

I could feel my lower jaw dropping and I’m pretty sure that my eyes sparked into flame.

Simone controlled the room, to be certain. “Thank you, Pepper.  Please make sure that we’re not bothered until I tell you otherwise.” (See – I told you I would learn that later…)

“Yes, Mistress,” Pepper bowed and backed out of the room to turn and walk back to the front of the office.

“Rant.  Thank you for coming.  Please take a seat,” she gestured to one of the chairs in front of her desk and walked around to sit in her chair behind it as I started to sit in the chair that she indicated.  She was completely comfortable, as if she were actually wearing clothes that I could not see right through.

“Have you ever worked in the film industry? Or as a model?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“Would you like to?”

“I suppose so – I hadn’t really thought about it.”

“Well, that is part of what I do here, but only part of it.  What do you know about BDSM?”

I knew a bit, actually, from my earlier experiences with the Lodge and the Rapture group, but I was not confident enough to speak about it, so I responded, “A little bit.  I know what the letters mean, at least.”

“Oh?  Please tell me.”

I responded without really considering it, “Bondage, discipline, sadism, and masochism.”

“Ah, yes.   You are correct, but you are omitting the most important part.”

“I am?”

“Dominance and submission.”

“Oh yes, I knew that.”

“I’m sure you did.”

“Tell me, Rant.  Are you single now?”

“Yes.”

“How many girlfriends have you had?”

“One.”

“Really?  Perhaps I should rephrase – you’re clearly not as innocent as you claim – how many women have you had sex with?”

“More than one.”

She smiled at me and I knew it was not a smile of mirth, but it made me swoon regardless.

“Do you like to eat pussy?”

I was a little shocked by this question, I must admit.  It was so abrupt – and women did not act like that, in my experience.

“Yes…” I responded, tentatively.

She got up from her desk and went to go sit on the couch that was along the wall of her office, to the side, and then she laid back a bit, spread her legs, and pulled the parts of her gown aside so that I could plainly see her beautiful pussy near the edge of the couch.  Her eyes were locked on me the entire time, and I’m certain that my own gaze was hungry.

“Would you like to eat my pussy?”

“Yes.”

“Then you may do so,” she said, completely matter-of-fact, fully expecting me to comply, and she was not disappointed.

I got up from my chair, walked over to the edge of the couch between her legs, then sank to my knees before her, knelt even lower, and nuzzled my face into her cunt, and began to lick at her with a tender touch.  She threaded her fingers into the hair at the back of my head and pulled me into her after a moment of this, saying, “More pressure.”

I was only happy to comply.

Eventually I brought my hand up, and began to insert a finger into her pussy when she slapped me hard right across the top of my head, “You will ask before you do something like that!”

“Yes, Mistress,” I said, thinking I was being cheeky, and then went back to what I was doing, without the finger.

“I do believe that you are getting the picture now,” she said and sat up straight, pulling herself away from me, but leaving me kneeling between her legs, cunt juice all over my face.

“Where do you live now?”

“Uhm..” I hesitate, not wanting to reveal the fact that I was essentially homeless at the time, “do you mean – where do I get mail?” I ask, timidly.

“Oh.  I see.  I would not have expected that, but it works to both of our advantage, as it happens.”

“It does?”

“I will give you an apartment to live in, and I will make sure that you have adequate care for your needs, and in return for this you will be mine – my slave – and you will do anything I ask of you without hesitation or question.  Do you agree?”

I was not really taking her seriously – I didn’t really understand what she was asking of me yet – but it sounded hot as hell and the idea of having an apartment provided for me, even if it meant that I’d be eating Simone’s pussy every day – or maybe especially if it meant that I’d be eating Mistress Simone’s pussy every day – that sounded very appealing to the me that I was then…

“I do.”

“Excellent.  Now how shall we begin?”

<to be continued in part 6>