On Making Things

This has been an unusual period of waiting in my life. Like having a phone call scheduled at 3 PM that you spend all day anticipating, I have had an immigration deadline hanging off in an ever further future for months. It has instilled in me a sort of dissociated paralysis – unable to settle into the business of life making here in the small town I am camping in, working a dead end job during the normal hours of socializing, and falling away from rope. It seems to me that suburbia is a waiting room and there is little to do here but tap my foot.

One form of foot tapping is the repetitive and meditative task of turning raw fluffy wool into yarn, and then making things out of that yarn. I received this material from a neighbor who tends a small herd of sheep, and another of alpaca. They are very gentle animals that seem impossibly idyllic in the rural New England setting they live in. Using a small device called a spindle I turned the dyed fiber into single strands, and then twisted the strands against each other in the opposite direction to create a 2 stranded yarn that tensions the twist against itself to keep it from unraveling. The process was surprisingly efficient once I got the hang of it, but this should not be too surprising. After all, for at least 10,000 years the spindle was the sole tool available to humankind to turn raw materials into thread, necessary for all kinds of tasks related to the production of textiles.

The finished object tells its own story of growing experience. My first yarn was horribly inconsistent, and my first few rows of knitting with it were stilted and uncertain. I made up a simple pattern using half remembered stitches from a knitting lesson I am sure my grandmother gave me when I was about 11, and much more helpfully, some Youtube tutorials. The strands are very gently thick and thin, some sections of fabric bulky and dense, while others dip into a lacey lightness as the yarn thins out. Somewhere in the midpoint I picked up a stitch, so one side is slightly wider than the other. Still, at the end is a perfectly wearable neck warmer – made in the traditional way, from local materials.

There is something in psychology called the Effort Driven Reward Cycle, that describes the connection between doing things physically with our hands to complete some physical work. It is noted to be much more satisfying than other types of work – the brain simply is built to respond to physical exertion more than mental effort. So whether you are engaging in some human macrame or knitting a scarf, I hope that you find it rewarding!

You could be forgiven for not knowing the precise internal logic of a depressed, suburban shopping mall. I forgive you this, at least, hoping that my little mercy is returned. And being that we are both strangers to this waning cultural hub, I assume you also didn’t know the opening hours nor the pre-open community of Mall Walkers who run the cavernous, air conditioned, halls. But let’s backtrack. 

There is a certain type of aspirational consumerism that I unfortunately fell victim to. Considering myself to be a generally socially conscious and environmentally responsible person, I purchased my Iphone second hand – fooled by the branding of “recycled,” and in denial of the fact that really I was just looking for a deal. So with my new phone and 50 percent savings in my pocket I went about my life, until one day the LCD screen simply separated from the backing in a very alarming way. First one corner went, and then the whole thing popped off all at once. Or rather it only seemed to happen that way. In reality the internal stresses must have been accumulating for a long time, only to manifest on the surface in a sudden release of pressure. This is the method by which many things break.

This is not a metaphor. 

This is Geology. The way the Mall building sprouts up in a sea of asphalt, like a mountain or some kind of moated castle. I couldn’t imagine a world in which all of these parking spaces were necessary, and parked in a far corner simply to have the pleasure of walking through as many of them as I could. Many spaces I am sure had never been parked in, the way certain trees in Montana feel like a person never walked past until you came along in your hiking boots. The automatic doors have not worked for a long time and the hinges groan – you discover this is not a mountain at all but some sterile, semi-abandoned Martian compound. Cynically sponsored by Auntie Annie’s and Foot Locker – dedicated to the preservation of capitalism in Space, or whatever, human life. 

I thought the surviving stores would be open, operating as I was on the social contract that business hours are 9-5. I was wrong. Until 11:30, the mall belongs to the walkers. Hordes of them. Walking. They don’t all travel in packs, some go self supported with their fanny packs and cushioned shoes – they pedal along at great speed with a stepfordian smile plastered across their faces. I had no choice but to join in the flow, just to go see the other side of the Mall and ensure I wasn’t missing a secret second T-Mobile store who might miraculously be open at 10. I walked like a person at an airport, determined to go check my gate even knowing that the flight doesn’t leave for another hour and a half. They, the walkers, moved like missionaries – delighted to see a new visitor in their congregation. 

From behind came the first unnerving attack, “GOOD MORNING!” she said, with extreme volume. “Uhh, hi.” 

I am deeply unaccustomed to a world in which a slight grimace and moment of eye contact is not a sufficient greeting. I wish I could report that I quickly assimilated, but that would be a lie. Instead I put on headphones, hoping that nobody would realize my phone was broken and therefore no music was playing. This is also not a metaphor. Eventually, after about 35 laps and many more pained greetings, the stores gradually began to open. Chain link doors rolled up, exhausted workers switched on lights. It really felt like a second sunrise. And it took only 5 minutes for the phone technician to pronounce mine as well and truly dead. 

There isn’t a grand lesson to take away from this story. Sometimes you just waste your time and wind up somewhere weird. But hey, at least I got in my steps. 

A lot of things we do don’t really have any intrinsic meaning to them, we have to fill in those blanks ourselves. Like the index card that was left tucked into a borrowed book – an undefined opportunity until my friend wrote “bookmark” on it, sealing its fate as just that. The only question left in my mind is was it already a bookmark before the label, since it was serving that purpose? Or was it many things, currently serving as bookmark? Tomorrow, who knows, maybe a flashcard. What does it mean to be tied anyways? Is it just a physical manifestation of a dynamic or a feeling that exists before?

Maybe the best lesson rope taught me is that sometimes relationships need that physical manifestation. That love is an act, not a feeling. D/s is that too – or whatever it is I have for FavoriteBlanket. Admiration, a desire to shape and hurt her. A curiosity for what will happen next. She is a very good conversationalist.

And this one started as all polite conversations do – checking in, catching up on how we have been.

Although many people proclaim to hate small talk, it has its function.

You may start with the weather, but you don’t have to stay there. It’s just a gentler way to get into existential questions about our futures, and the different directions they are moving.

The hard questions without good answers – where to shift your body to make it hurt less. How to cope.

How to breathe with a rope around your diaphragm.

Eventually you slide into a comfortable silence, maybe with one final flourish before the talk is done for now. But not forever.

Big thanks to FavoriteBlanket for bringing me back to rope again and again ❤

For the longest time I’ve kept a jar of sprouts growing on my counter. Sometimes several jars, splayed out in various stages of growth like a science project. There is something beautiful and wholesome in the fresh greenness of them, but when I go to rip off a section of the deeply matted roots all I can picture is a rat king. That unfortunate tangle of fur and tails, trapping the desperate animals together in a Gordian knot.

It reminds me that there is always death in new growth, the other half of the cycle. The creeping vines of inevitability that encroach gently and relentlessly on the jungle ruins of your life. The jumbled chains of lovers, looking over their shoulders for a kiss. The beer you drink that you turn into piss in a bodily alchemy, to join back in the water cycle. Life tangles.

It isn’t morbid necessarily, but a raw scrape you keep butting up against. A strange artifact of courting leads you to bring up the dead relatives. Kept alive in the way all remembered things live forever. You read poems about your dead friends. You send pictures of your cat in a thousand playful position, each time holding your breath. You talk to the dead. You talk to yourself.

Every year I take a picture for my birthday, trying to capture something of who I am in that moment. Well, the project has evolved – at first I just wanted to make myself look good. Now I’m focusing more on telling a story. Maybe that’s part of my evolution now too, that I’m less preocupied with my own tenuous beauty. Either way, 27 really sucked. But like most ordeals, there was also a lot of growth. Thanks to all of my friends who took part in this year – I love you more than I can say.

Once upon a time in Barcelona 

Somewhere an old man plays tennis naked. The sand clings gently to the wet skin of his calves, kicked up by the impact of his running. He moves like an avalanche, swings wide, misses. You are transfixed. 

You go to sleep late and wake early. Your days are dictated by the petty desires of others. Another round, more food for the gaping wound of your stomach, a hug that lingers on the edge of discomfort. People keep asking you what you do for a living. You tell them you’re at work.

The cat is physically well kept but emotionally neglected. The young man asks you about motherhood and you realize you have become your mother. She pretends to have cancer to get your attention. Wives and mothers are impossible creatures. What is left for women? 

The music feels like a stroke. Words exist but lack meaning. Color fades out of a picture taken on a gray day that never rained. You imagine paintbrushes and bootheels and rhymes, but for what purpose? 

Life is a series of mysterious happenings. You owe the government money somehow. You pause to smell the lilac bush, and a gust of wind comes to fill it with movement. It bows towards you like a Japanese businessman. He asks for a glass of hot water, which is annoyingly complicated to fetch. This is an allegory. 

Life is a menu and you insist on ordering something different. The bartender makes it regardless. You pass the time imagining terrible cocktail names. You sit but without resting. Your mind is a blank canvas, stretched and ready, but imposing. 

You find new intrusive thoughts to ignore. A hand you must hold to not slam it accidentally on the ticket spike. A hand you must trail against the outer wall of the circular mall to not throw yourself into the atrium. A woman you ignore, but you picture her naked. You desire pain. 

You remember strangers with a fondness unfitting. Hairpiece from the train. Two muffins from the cafe. Bagelman. Coat. Your fingernails have been unpainted for a century. You wonder if they would avoid being caught in hinges if they were battle red. You hinge at the waist in a desperate stretch. 

The treadmill bores and complaces you. This too is an allegory, but a hopeful one. Not about running and getting nowhere, but about the gradual improvement of your body. Breaking and building are two parts of the same momentum. You grow tired of the taste of apples.

I recently had the chance to go through Betty Martin’s Wheel of Consent with someone new. Which I always think is a good first or second date activity – not only because it helps you get on the same page as your new flame, but also because it impresses their therapist. (a totally normal thing to want, btw) Seeing it new through the eyes of another, I was again reminded of the power of the Take / Allow axis, and how neglected it is by mainstream society.

The take / allow waters are the ones we often find ourselves swimming in during the exploration of D/s or S/m. And learning how to take without guilt was a powerful tool to add to my kit as a top.
Getting good at taking as a top is also a great way to honor your own needs and boundaries.

I recently had a chance to tie with my lovely friend FavoriteBlanket again. The nature of our evolving rope friendship has found our desires more often aligned than disaligned, which means I don’t have to spend much energy on holding myself back from crossing a boundary of hers. While having this alignment is not a requirement by any means to have a good rope scene, it allows for a freeness and fluidity that simply makes it less emotional labor.

One thing I think is especially true for female tops, is that we have been conditioned to Give (also called Serve in the above graphic) much more than we have been conditioned to Take. And anyone who develops skill with rope knows, it is very easy to slut a little too close to the sun and find yourself feeling like a carnival ride for a dehumanizing number of eager rope bottoms.
At least for me, life got a whole lot easier when I realized I simply dont have that large of a capacity to Give, especially not to strangers. But tying in line with my selfish desires? Yes please!

It isn’t always easy, in fact, to be in touch with your own desires. This is especially true when the desires are deviant – that I want to hurt or expose the beautiful woman in front of me. When I don’t know what to tie, however, this is what I go back to.
Instead of following some recipe or pattern, I add an element, step back, and really try to see what I want. Do I want to touch her? Do I want to hurt her? Do I want to take off her shirt?

I let it build, following this intuition. I watch for a response, and try to follow the ones I like. And of course, I back off when the intensity gets too high.

As you tie this way more and more you can find that certain impulses get magnified simply because they are louder. The desire to sit back and watch, or give my partner endorphins and a gentle stretch are there too, they just have a quieter voice. But as we transition from a peak of pain and intensity, I want to make my partner feel strong and admired. Life is about balance afterall.

And after all that, sometimes all you want to do is play!

Big thanks to FavoriteBlanket for so expertly leaning in to all my bad ideas. And thank you to Pinchinawa for the use of his space, and shooting these lovely pictures ❤

Squished meat and imaginary weekends- or more thoughts on walking.

I went back to New York, just for a day and a walk. Long and measured by the full length of Manhattan. With frequent stops for:

1. A bagel from my favorite spot which wasn’t quite as good as I remember.

2. Coffee. 

3. An appointment with the doctor who will clear me for my visa, which consisted of:

a. waiting

b. small talk

c. explaining myself

d. height, weight, vitals

e. discussions of the hospital I was born in. (an example: “No, I don’t think you delivered me, that doctor looked like Tom Selleck” “I know him!” and so on)

4. Coffee. (very expensive) 

5. Juice. (At this point I realized you can’t escape any shop in the city without parting ways with at least $10) 

6. Lunch into Dinner with my ex. He is still so beautiful. 

I have been back to New York several times in the past few years. For a time it was one of *my* places, as it has always been a place for many a person with an idea of making it or whatever. But somehow this time was different. Maybe because I no longer have any emotional ties to the city, or the bad memories have faded and now there is just a pleasant wash of nostalgia on my old work commute and corner spot and the book store, and the other places I recognize not from a movie but from the internal cinema of my memories. The whole day had this gentleness to it.

I also didn’t bring a camera, which I think is very healthy when you go to New York. That whole damn city has been photographed to death, I fear there is simply nothing interesting left to look at through a viewfinder. Or maybe I have become uninteresting. This possibility thrills me.

And just as soon as I was there I was gone again, back into the habits of work and spending time with the elderly. I worry about the elder woman and what it means to be a woman. I chopped off half my hair in an act of subconscious protest. She loved it, and petted it gently. She cried when she told me of her poor mistreated sister. Mistreated by life and men. She nurses the elder man with exceptional care and little thanks. There is always food in the fridge for me. She is the kind of person who walks past you with such poise that even age couldn’t touch and you just sigh and think, “what a lady.” She wears an abundance of stripes. 

And there is always something else to learn here. HERE, the place I am waiting. It occurred to me that waiting really is just some kind of faith. That the thing you’re waiting for will be worth it. That the friendships will survive you. That the learning won’t be wasted. And they won’t be. The brain can hold many things at once, and there is always need for at least one more cocktail recipe. They’re useful for impressing women.

Imagining future Sundays 

There is no Sunday, sneaking up on silent shoes. 

The burning ice, swirled and tempered by the glass.

The fast repeal of bodies, crushing at the door, let in, and left again 

only a dirty napkin and a ring of condensation to let you know. 

I never guessed how much of waiting involved *waiting*

you know? Or how strange it feels to introduce myself over and over

and always lying. Finding now it feels strange to tell the truth, 

nakedly. In a bed that smells of cigarettes. To a man I trust will hurt me. 

To a man I know wants to. And the agony of being a daughter. 

Impossible child of the child – unlicensed to create. 

Or how we wait for my father’s birthday, 

planning the celebration of my mother’s – two years out. 

How we celebrate the dead, with a party. 

A drink, poured directly into an open mouth. 

A coffee, a shared mourning. 

And the weakness I diagnosed as strength 

is only strength, afterall.

The smart watch 

I was given a smart watch for Christmas 4 years ago. I wore it religiously for the first 3 months and soon tired of the endless charging it required and the baby pink watch band that accumulated grime at an alarming rate. One day I let the battery go out and still wore it for about a week after that – a dead watch. I would check it occasionally just to see my annoyed eyeball staring back out at me from the dark, reflective face. 

It then sat in a box, next to its charger for several years. And I found it as I was panning for gold in my possessions before leaving Montana. I’m wearing it again, currently at 56% charge. 

I read an article some time ago, by which I mean I watched a video about it by a man with creative facial hair, about the fact you shouldn’t use a laser pointer to play with your cat. The lack of a tangible prey analog at the end of the chase eventually gets into your cat’s head and they develop a lack of confidence unfitting for that type of creature. I absorbed the suggestion and immediately tossed my laser pointer, and picked back up the mouse on a string toy. Anything for my baby. 

My baby, however, fucking loves to chase laser lights. And in their absence she has developed an affinity for shadows. She waits at corners during certain times of the day when the sun is right and the curtain flitters a bit in the wind – and then she just throws herself at the wall over and over trying to pin down the moving shadow. I cant erase all such stimulus from the house so I am afraid she will simply develop a complex. Her favorite lure though, as it turns out, is the little circle of light reflected from the face of this damn watch. 

Every morning as I sit in my chair and raise the coffee cup to my lips, I send a little reflection running across the room – my cat in hot pursuit. Her ego seems as yet unaffected, but time will tell. 

The watch does not only do the traditional magic of telling the time but is also equipped with a pedometer and heart rate monitor. It is rather alarming to have such a finger on the pulse of my anxiety throughout the day. At the end of the night I pull up my app and get to see the full landscape of cardiovascular activity. 

Every working night around 430 PM I am cleaning old candle wax out of candle holders. We use a butterknife and it is always done in a rush. 5 minutes in the cardio zone! At 10:23 AM I decide to go back to sleep – so that’s 3 minutes of cardio with my lover analog and then 1 hour of sleep, bumping my sleep score for the day to a whopping 71. Around 9PM I chance upon my coworker in the starewell where we go to hide from customers, the proximity puts me into the cardo zone for a full 7 minutes. At the end of the day I have paced 6 miles up and down this narrow stretch of bar. 

It occurrs to me on mile 4 that the backbar is a kind of sticky beach. Maybe just today, after a different comrade broke 3 glasses and hastily swept the broken pieces. Still, I could sense tiny shards remaining underfoot, experiencing the mechanical weathering of my walking. I wonder how long it will take before they simply return to sand. Someone is trying to ask me about absinthe and I am thinking that the floor back here makes me want to lift my feet like a dog wearing socks. 

I’m sorry sir, you wanted a Sazerac? 

I tell you these things for no apparent reason – except to remind myself that I took my watch off in these pictures, and therefore have no idea the effect it had on my heartrate. But my cat, at least, was grateful for some rope to chase instead of weightless light.

 

On what is happening now –

I’m learning that life is strange, and has a way of bringing people back around to you. Of course, this is not in fact a given, but in the rope world friends don’t really seem to leave forever. Maybe that’s just because Boston is one of those black holes people get sucked back into. Maybe its because life is a small town. For whatever reason, I got to see an old friend again recently, and tie her.

It was a good break from my usual wandering. Not in any metaphorical sense, but wandering in the practical aimlessness of it. My strategy for life has evolved to one where I simply start walking. I trick myself into productivity by letting my body move before my brain catches up. And so here I am, out on familiar trails that I somehow still know the rhythm of – just me and the trees.

Among the familiar is new as well. New work – physical and analog. I stumbled my way into a digital detox of a kind, putting my phone away for a good part of the week to focus on what’s in front of me. And I put down my rope, too. Not for long, but in the past few weeks I haven’t even thought about it. That is the new part – the mental break from rope in concert with the physical break.

There’s something uncanny in the realization that you have buried a part of yourself, for however short a time. Like when you come home expecting to see the family dog who’s been dead for years. It’s easy to forget – and then you feel strange for forgetting. Or you wake up from a nap in someone else’s bed and catch yourself thinking for a moment you’re somewhere else. Or that the house you used to know has fallen into disrepair, and you can happen upon it in the woods. Uncanny.

Or that you can pick up the conversation mid-stream. A familiar book opened to a random page – where the story is resumed. That is how it is to tie old friends. A hand fitting easily into a glove.

We started with a long warmup – as I almost always do. Tying and untying in an organic way. Testing the range of flexibility, the tension in the body and rope. I had a completely different shape in mind but found that Jersey moved in an interesting different direction that I could follow. So we went for something more horizontal.

One thing which may not be clear from the photos is that I have a strong preference against adding new uplines. Although I tied on this half monoblock, I never added an upline specifically for it. Instead, I first lifted it using the leftover rope from the chest harness’ upline, and then when I decided to lower the chest, I made sure to tension the half monoblock using the remaining rope from the futomomo’s upline. There is something I like in this technique – it forces you to think about separate parts of the tie as a set. This keeps me honest, and makes sure I don’t accidentally drop all the weight onto the waist – since I need to untie it before I can get to the futomomo.

As we made our way to the ground I felt there was an opportunity to play in a partial. I used the rope from the blindfold to pull Jersey into a back bend. Though it is not the most dramatic shape, when someone follows the pull of the rope with their neck instead of their middle back, the position becomes intense very quickly. Their breathing becomes impaired and you will need to watch carefully to ensure it doesn’t become too much. We lingered here for a few long breaths and then came down – first by releasing the neck, then the feet, then the chest.

Thank you so much Jerseyb0und for the chance to reconnect and tie! And thanks always to Pinchinawa for the use of his space and all the other friendly things ~

I am still convinced this can be a poetry blog as well as a rope one – so we will end on one about how life is these days.

A pea-green daydream 

Take comfort in destruction now
That beavers conjure, pond from field -  
And come each year to gnaw and work 
the same tree dead. Who lingers on,
or falls instead. 

It can be counted as a marker, 
on the trail you’ve run for years
Back into memory, green and childish - 
now the greenhorn, “rookie” called, 
when she forgets to grab the silver. 

And you- the aging house gone caving in, 
like teeth freed from a mouth - 
Misshapen by your craft,
the crooked fingers and a limp,
from one leg favored all these years. 

A cocktail poured and given freely,
perks of this, your thankless job. 
The heating bill you can’t afford, 
but you will learn the lesson of the day - 
To wait. As the machinery churns, 
what shoes to wear, and where to stand. 

How not to love the man behind the bar, 
just transference. An old mistake 
to love the bell that signals food, 
and call it love, when only making 
it is true. 

Or how to simply cry, or not 
against the hands that knead you. 
Touch, a pain infused with kindness
Little dangers, hands and fingers. 
Crooked, from years on the job, 
inspected - held, and kissed. 

And that there is a way to come, 
Home. Though it dissolved in green. 
But still the tree stands, and the man 
behind the bar is sober. 
And he will take confessions too. 

On Walden Pond and boundaries

The primary tourist attraction available to you, humble traveler, in the town my parents live in is rocks. As you point your nose east out of Boston and peddle out to the sticks, what you can’t get is a decent cup of coffee, but you are sure to find a heaping pile of earth. Many such piles. At least 14,000 years ago a giant ice sheet scraped its way clean through to Cape Cod, leaving behind randomly occurring boulders – stood out in the middle of fields, or wedged into hillsides, or even in good ol’ Plymouth of the pilgrim fame. These Glacial Erratics came in all manner of sizes and proved to be a boon to the local population of masons, who criss-crossed this land with expertly stacked stone walls, many of which still mark the boundary lines of their descendants’ properties. The commonwealth is nothing if not well exfoliated. 

And this legacy of fences extended to another glacial gift, Walden pond, of Thoreau fame. The enemy of high school lit students everywhere, Mr. Henry David built himself a house on the shore of Walden pond and called himself a recluse. Perhaps it was more remote in his day, but the size and proximity to downtown Concord makes me think that bathing in these hallowed waters would be about as spiritual and impressive as splashing in a puddle in a Walmart parking lot. But we all need our fantasies of ruggedness – this is after all what America was built on. 

Keen students of the history of New England will know that there are hardly any old growth forests left to us here. As it happens the white man clear cut almost straight through to Georgia, and try as we might to plant back the trees, on the shores of Walden pond there is an eerie artificialness to it. The trees are too young, too far apart. Undergrowth is kept at bay by trampling feet, not the sun dampening foliage of elder trees. It has the feeling of a forest-garden which was dreamed up in the 70s, because well, that’s what it is. And more ironically, in this Church of Nature, the entire pond-circling walking path is fenced in on both sides with an narrow, wire picket. 

Now, if you have anything approaching my inseam, you can step over the wires. But the psychological effect is the same- “Civilization is on this side, and nature is on that side.” You are not invited to step outside the wire, but merely to look from a distance. But it’s hard not to linger on the sheer arbitrariness of it all. Nature, is not an empirical category but an imagined one – imagined in the mind of Mr. Thoreau just as it was in my own mind, tramping through the Montana woods only to be disappointed by the appearance of a fire road deep out in the bush. The humans are here, and we are part of it. All you have to do is duck under the fence. 

The irony does not escape me that in spite of how unimpressive I found Walden (and its gift shop), it did inspire this writing. Mostly because it reminded me of an early pedagogical lesson I received on kinbaku. The gist of which was that you must use rope and only rope, and in order to make it about dominance and submission, as was the order of the day, you should start either with the wrists or the neck. Now, this is not entirely ridiculous. For the excited, new rope top, establishing some limiting criteria is a necessary and prudent step. And so, dutifully, I began every scene for years with either a binding of the wrists or a column tie around the neck. Hot. 

Eventually, however, I started to open myself to the idea that this arbitrary distinction was just that, arbitrary. And with the help of my most bad-ass of rope bottoms, Suidae, we started to push beyond this fence as well. I still believe in the utility of containing the arms – and maybe this seems obvious to you, but it was a huge mental challenge to simply not tie the wrists. If you look through my pictures you will start to notice that in almost every image, the person’s wrists are tied. This is after all, the first step in tying a gote. 

It happened the first time entirely on accident – I had just returned from Belgium where I was immersing myself in the style of Nicolas Yoroi, and practicing some one rope play. Suidae and I dancing in the way that only they can dance, when I realized I had established what were actually quite usable upper wraps on an arms front harness, lack of wrist-cuff be damned! I continued to tie the rest of the harness, freestyling as I like to do, and locked it off – checking to make sure we were not ripping Suidae’s thumbs off. I learned many lessons from that tie – one being that the thumbs can actually be used very successfully as an anchor point, and also that thumbs are not wrists.

If you, seeing this, would like to try the same – there are some details which are important to consider.
One, that you must find a way to break the tension in the line from the thumbs to the rest of the harness.
Two, that your bottom has the ability and body-knowledge to sense when they are having nerve problems without the ability to do the thumbs up test or raise their wrists.
And three, that you do not tie yourself into a corner without the ability to untie the fingers quickly.

There are several other details, which frankly go beyond the scope of this writing, but I am happy to answer questions via email and/or show this concept in more detail in person! 

But the story continues – as we got more practiced and confident as a team at tying the fingers, I wanted to push the boundaries of my rope even more. I decided to try using different materials, while attempting to keep the aesthetics of rope bondage. Unlike the standard kinky bondage, with its focus on pink handcuffs and leather strapping, I wanted to keep to shapes which would be possible to create with rope. Mostly, because I find them beautiful, whereas my primary dislike of the full gimp approach is it tends to turn the person into a bit of a sausage. Using pipecleaners, I bound Suidae’s fingers and eventually toes – and then used bungee cords to bring them into a seated position with the potential for a bit of rocking movement.

From here I wanted to play with the limited motion and lean in to the stretch of the bungee. Unlike jute which has very little stretch and becomes rigid under tension, bungee lets the position breathe. However, it is also a much less predictable material – as the tension changes with every breath and shift of weight. You can’t set it like you can with standard rope.

I added another material, webbing, to bring them into an off balanced partial.

From here we played for a while, adding elements and then removing them – only to add more.

If I have any parting wisdom to offer on this writing it is that I have come to understand rope as something without hard boundaries. You can get very deep in the meta about it, and explore the mental bondage of D/s, or you can explore just at the edges of your current repertoire – moving a few inches south of the wrist to the fingers. But like a video-game map that starts entirely covered up in fog, all it takes is a bit of exploration to find something new and worthwhile. 

It goes without saying that none of this would be possible without the true collaboration and insights brought by Suidae. Miss you!

Is it still a flight log when there was no flight?

Why not.

Winter Walking

From unspoken to spoken goes the silence, 
broken, by the crash of ice 
that heaves up chestlike: rising, falling. 
In the cold mouth pouts a sputter, 
red. The only spot for miles, 
and a foot who finds the water. 

You seem to melt into the darkness,
named for light, and often lighting
candles that you let burn low. 
And drag your fingers, rough and boyish 
down my side. You draw a bath
and see too late, the stopper’s missing. 

We stay awake, and in the morning 
go again to walk. For reasons 
we don’t know ourselves,  
but well, the snow wants to be seen. 
In all its crashing, broken forests 
trees in all manner of undress,
and ducks go running. 

In this false winter of your 20s, 
madness that you swap for anger,
lust that you confuse for love,
and righteousness you’ll soon give up. 
There is only the work that’s left you,
tend the animal of your body 
and go get warm again.