Flying without an engine

Healthcare brouhaha

2010-03-26T10:12:00.004-04:00

Listen, we all use health care, pretending we will never go to see a doctor or nurse is crap. And when we need it, often we really need it. So who pays for it if you don't have insurance or enough money to pay the admittedly exorbitant prices -- everyone else. It's time for all of us to buy into the system and I mean buy. I think everyone should have to pay something in. If not in taxes then in insurance. It's like education, highways, and defense. We all need it and we all expect it. Whether we say it or not, we really believe we are all entitled to some form of health care when we get seriously injured or ill.

It's Valentine's Day

2010-02-13T09:51:00.004-05:00

And I am working, and in Mississippi with 4 inches of snow, and he is in Ohio, and the world feels frozen to the core.

Thank God, I went to read the blog of a writer I have yet to read -though I have bought her first big book - but whom I discovered quite by chance during Nanowrimo when she sent out a letter of encouragement to the nanoers. She has a very refreshing way of writing and makes me believe in my continueing efforts at writing. I give the child inside me the right to write.

http://kristincashore.blogspot.com/

Her Valentine's Day post made me tear up, but then made me smile. Thanks!

When we were good

2010-02-09T21:05:00.002-05:00

When we were good, we were very, very good, and when we were bad, we were awful. I don't know how, or even if, I can explain to my family and friends how high he seemed to make me fly and what he meant to me. We are, or were, living a mythological dream. It may be all my imgination, but I see us as two different beings from two different cultures that were in an eternal grapple, black and white, not racial, but our way of viewing the world. He has this dark, Irish, pessimistic view, and I, for whatever reason, have this optimistic, despite it all, view. Whatever happens, to allow the Germanic pessimistic veiw prevail is to give up on the possibility of change, and I beleive in change, and persoanl focus. I beleive that we can change the story that people want to tell about us. I beleive that we can out live this story they want us to be. That we can be more.

Spring is coming, hold on Lookout

2010-01-20T08:01:00.004-05:00

61 degrees in MS. yes I will survive.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4p27m5Y5b4

Plans

2010-01-19T22:52:00.002-05:00

I am, unlike up to 10% of us, still gainfully and well-employed. I am able to pay bills and give to charity. I have the option of helping my family get by. I have, however, had to curtail much of the life I've written of here. I loved my years with "Him." But I don't know if we can go forward from here. I feel that together we created chaos, though it was quite inventive, but it seemd to be carreening out of control, perhaps only mine. I miss him and will walk on, but question whether I was goood for him or not, in the end. I feel richer for having met him, but am not sure the years with me have been good for him as a person.

Still it is good to be able to plan. Whether we make it (or if there is even a 'we') to Froliccon is open. I have made a good head way in my debts and have different ideas about work and what I want from it. I have come to understand some of what made us click as a couple of not very renegades. I only hope I can help him, and that I can be a better partner, at the same time helping him to see how we might go forward, better, together.

This Year

2009-02-26T19:12:00.002-05:00

Bondage.com has changed it's management a bit, is opening up once again -- more kink firendly. This year will be the year I pay down debt, the year I write, the year I get ready for college, the year I garden again, the year, I get ready for the rest of my life. I am ready to go forward from a failed marriage, working a new job. Ready to not let myself be a cog in the machine. I will be kinder, listen more. I am ready for this country to stop being so fat, ready to button down and get the basics right.

Back in Black

2008-07-10T01:19:00.002-04:00

Or, at least, back in MS. The last year has been busy, but I am settling into a new life and hoping to spend more time in my LIFE, as opposed to my work. College looms and I love my expanded vegetable garden.

Post from b.com

2007-09-18T00:24:00.001-04:00

Louisvile, KY, after an 18 hour drive in my 'vette (Che'vette) for a residency interview. He turned around in his seat as I scuttled in, a couple of minutes late due to downtown traffic and shitty directions. He rally was tall and dark and slim. I was busty and blonde. Yes, we locked eyes, but I thought it was only me. 10 hours later, after the interview process wound it's way down, he never made it back to his hotel room. He was Lebanese-French-American, and I can't remember his name, but the sex had me clutching at the headboard for support and he left me with a poem on the pillow when he departed before dawn. Omar Sharif, I call him, and the best one-night stand.

What is 'Real?'

2007-07-10T12:01:00.000-04:00

Walking along with the puppies (now almost dogs), picking blackberries on another dusty graveled road. It seems much of the summers of my childhood were spent this way, the locusts see-sawing in the heat, the humidity about a hundred, the temperature just shy of that and me popping delectable berries into my mouth only a little worried about the small bug I might have eaten with it and whether something taller than my dog might have peed on it. But, I figured, I’m immune anyway with all the stuff I’ve consumed over the years. Then I thought about people who needed the wild food to survive and it struck me that when people talk about a thing being ‘real,’ they mean when there is no alternative.

Stated another way. Cowboys didn’t necessarily choose to be rough, dirty, and broken down. The men (and women) adapted themselves to the reality they faced. That is what we mean when talk about being real. When the choices are limited by circumstances you can’t control – a miserable childhood in the East End of London during the Great Depression, a starving woman in Bangladesh, Paris during the Revolution, the multiple small tragedies of wars. Many first and second world people feel we aren’t real. We don’t risk our lives, we don’t feel genuine. But real is what happens when you run out of options.

We have, put it another way, options that a poor man in Indonesia with a wife and kids, doesn’t have. We are tourists in their life because, no matter what, we can run back home to the safety of the American border. We can hide behind our trust funds or our retirement funds or our insurance. We are padded and coddled. And we feel we aren’t adults, we aren’t real. This invalidity is because of too many choices. When you get up to ride a wild horse at a dude ranch to play cowboy, you have the choice of getting off the horse and walking away. You didn’t spend a day catching the cussed thing to add to your meager stable. Now you have a horse you have to feed through the winter and, with luck, tame before spring roundup. You, as the tourist might get hurt, but you have the choice of walking away. You don’t have a need for the horse.

Gardening is fun, when your very life doesn’t depend on it. You can always hand off the overabundant squash to a friend, but if that were all you had through the winter, you’d find ways to cook it and scrounge like hell for other food. Hunting now is mostly play, but it was a matter of feeding the family not much more than three generations ago.

When we talk about BDSM people being real, many of us who use it to spice our lives have chosen to have it in our lives, but it is not absolutely necessary that we have it daily. For some it is the center and the be all. They have given up many things – family ties, marriages, jobs, bank accounts, to follow their dream of being someone’s slave, or to be full-on leather all the time with apologies toward none. They have rolled the dice and all they have is placed on that one bet. So those people sneer at the amateurs. They have no choices (by their own choice or psychological makeup) they have systematically followed their dream down the rabbit hole and the options are limited. You have to respect a person who bets it all on one roll. You respect them, but I am too much of a hedger.

I am a hedger; maybe life teaches you that, teaches you to play a little less wildly because you have more to lose or because you have lost so much that you are afraid to go forward, afraid to lose what took so long to gain. I have been in that mode for most of the last 5-7 years. I used to be more open and more generous. But I am hoping that this spring and summer, which have felt like such a relief after the dark years preceding them, will continue into the fall and that I will spend my fall flying, a priority. That I will look for opportunities to expand my life, that I will be willing to bet a little more.

Rubber Ball Atlanta

2007-07-01T18:56:00.000-04:00

J Sin of Secretroom.net found a perfect spot to party for the pervy. Almost everyone was dressed to the nines, weather in vinyl, latex, thinly disguised flesh, or mostly exposed flesh. Apparently we missed the cabaret actf from the night before but the Wet Bar in Atlanta was welcoming and open and clean and provided the right amount of mixed spaces -- a Whipping cross on a rotating platform, a stage for strolling and strutttung and parading, elevated viewing area, lost of cozy garden niches for tete-a'-tetes. There was a professional photgrapher and a best dressed contest in which Cam and I participated after being inviegled by a tall man, vaguely familiiar from reading Buckle Magazine (Atlanta's short-lived kink magazine), dressed in yellow spandex and bright blue feathers, the costume one would have supposed came from Cirque de Soleil's closets. But we only joined as a lark, though proud of our gear, there were others in much more imaginative gear. A woman encased in a hot pink latex corset which bound her arms to her sides and her head enclosed in a similar head piece so that she was lead blindly through the mob to the stage. Another, presumably, woman, tall, encase din black latex with a tricorn helmet that was also part of a seamless whole with the catsuit, no face revealed, and striped brightly in neon colors on the seams. The locals seemed happy to share the space and didn't resent us at all, and we eve drew in a few curious people form our hotel the Wyatt which was plalying host to the wheelcir racers in the Peachtree Run, got to dance with a man dubbed "Rocky" who was one of their coaches. he enjoyed dancing with latex-clad women, sweating all over him.
Great music, supercool Hummer limousines back and forth to the party, later afterparty, to the hotel, More private play at the hotel. Thank god they let us check out at 1 p!

Skin Two's Rubber Ball Atlanta

2007-06-23T10:38:00.000-04:00

Te Rubber Ball Atlanta is due this weekend (the 29th and 30th of June) and I am getting excited about it. We haven't seen any of our buddies since the weekend of the hard freeze (Easter to normal people) during Frolicon in April. I am looking forward to wearing the latex fetish gear and stomping around in boots. I am Sabotage! At least so he dubbed me after the last time I got geared up, and, in truth, it does make me look vaguely like some comic book superhero. But, hey, hasn't every man wanted to bed one of those?

Manged to embarass a man I thought was unembarassable. My (female) neighbor and I were standing about oohing and aahing over his vintage (he's had it since it came out)1967 Mustang, the original engine has been tinkered with, but the body, paint, interior, is all original. We teased him about the wear marks onthe paint just where a guy might stand while he waxed it on the streets, letting the girls see him, and offering to take 'em for a ride. We dubbed Bob SMD Smith (fictitious). "SMD? What's that stand for?"

"Why isn't that the whole reason for buying the mustang in the first place?"

"What?"

"Suck My Dick." This 57 year old veteran blushed.

South Georgia Fires

2007-06-02T17:41:00.000-04:00

The south GA fire is affecting our weather. It is overcast, almost like a Renaissance painting where the distance is indicated by the level of smog. So it is here, as bad, if not worse than August, when you can’t see Sand Mountain for the particles in the air. We are 15 inches behind in rain, the mature trees are drooping, and though not as hot, it feels smothery, even a hint of smoke fills the air. Both Mom and I reported sleeping poorly, as if the older, animal parts, of our brain were worried even while the cerebral parts tried to calm them. They kept murmuring “fire!” in our sleep.

What do you really value

2007-05-09T12:20:00.000-04:00

It was one of those October days that you wish wold never die. I did my yoga, while, I still can, out on the deck of my studio (trying to remember to call it that) and, once again, reminded myself why I love that discipline so much – it makes me feel with all my senses – I can smell the aging leaves and whiff of Cam’s cigarette. I hear the train, birds peeping, the wind lifting the leaves, the train in the valley, the long approach of traffic. I see a red-tailed hawk, and the yet green trees, the deeper blue of the sky that occurs in fall. I feel my feet on the soft rug, the air touch my chest, the bruises form the weekend on my buttocks, the twinge in my left shoulder that comes on with too many nights of poor sleep, and the luxurious stretch in the muscles – like a cat. I taste a metallic twang from the slight sinus infection.

Sitting with my mother in the Chinese restaurant in Trenton it seemed to me that the essence of being human (we were discussing “The Good Earth” by Pearl S. Buck) is balance, striking the happy medium. “Moderation in all things.”

I can’t recall who said that, but much of our life is figuring out what is the happy medium when others have gone on before us to try to lead the way. Trouble is that the happy medium seems to be all in your perspective. Did Mother Teresa consider herself extreme? And is it extreme to listen to your muse and miss the housekeeping. What if your culture values the beautifully kept and appointed house or the nineteen courses, three day prep time, meal, or the clothes that cost thousands of dollars, drachmas, francs, and untold hours to assemble? That leads us back, inextricably, to what we value in our lives. What do I value? Clean house, yes, but farther down the list, still I want a clean house, so I pay someone to keep it relatively clean for me. Fame, seems to be a requirement of our culture, money, yes and no, children, yes and no. What is it I want?

To be published, to have written. Yes, and time for creativity and play and good food and sex and hanggliding and travel. I don’t think I value money for prestige, more for what it can do – security of a sort, travel, the little day-to-day thingies that we suddenly perceive we can’t exist another moment without. I value literacy and language and fairness. I am the child of a child raised on the egalitarian spirit that ran across the nation during the Great Depression, that leveled so many of us. Made us all poor, all equal, all having to understand the day-to-day tribulations of our neighbors because we were all (at least the plurality of us working and farming people) in ‘it’ together. When I was growing up in the military, we were all poor together, except we weren’t really poor only by today’s standards, or some more elite’s. See, the thing is, when everyone around you is poor, and you aren’t starving or naked, you don’t ever know you’re poor.

We were all young families starting out, with multiple children, and hand-me-downs were de rigeur. Mothers learned to get by on what the man brought home. Made do with soups and stews and what we got off the local markets. Or you went hunting or fishing or bought things in bulk and put them up or raised them and did the same, or bought a side of beef with your brother-in-law and split it. Shoes got passed down and coats, none of it was really worn out, mended or shortened. We grew too fast. And, since all of us shared clothes and ‘made do’ it wasn’t any kind of hardship. I liked that time and miss it. Too much TV, too much consumer culture exposed to ur children, to ourselves. So, back to balance.

One person’s balance might involve religion and how much time ot devote to it and their own life, their families' lives. Another might want all the outward accoutrmenets of wealth, but get in over their head in debt. One of us might spend all her time pursuing sports,never reading.

And my writing. Why is my nattering of any more import than another persons? We so value our own individuality, our own ‘voice.’ Trouble is that, from space, we probably all sound like the see-sawing of the locusts. Each singing his or her own song that sounds very like the rest. The few about us worth listening to get drowned out. The few with a real original thought disappear in the crowds. And why is my nattering any more of importance than that of some poor girl in a the slums of Rio de Janeiro? Maybe it is the whole of our voices going on for ages that actually is of import. Maybe it is our own individual song weaving in with the others of our era that matter, the blogs, and diaries, the columns and newspaper articles, the very focus of our individual attentions that matters. Perhaps the topics that we write of, as a group, make up what is human in the first part of the third millennium.

Individuals are now all-important and we expect our governments, not just to protect our borders, our families, but our individual selves, even if those selves are so widely disparate as to defy easy listing. I am a human, female by genitalia, androgynous by thought (and testing) and preference, a thinker with a more or less intact brain, by luck and genetics and upbringing and parentage. I am a desultory writer, genealogist, bisexual (with a strong heterosexual leaning), a feminist, a liberal (by American standards), a pro-democracy advocate, a believer in the infinity of our rights so long as ‘my fist doesn’t hit your nose.’ An Emergency medicine-trained doctor, somewhat computer literate, deliverer of babies, lover of literature, a pilot of hanggliders, a practitioner of yoga, a walker, and international traveler, curious, but also very selfish. A talker and listener. I am, thank god and my teachers, literate! Employed, not homeless, in debt, not a parent (not my choice), divorced once, currently involved deeply with one man. Friend to a handful of people, devoted to animals both furry and otherwise, daughter, ex-wife, lover, niece, teacher, ACLS instructor, semi-German speaker, educated in some Latin, lover of history, sci-fi writer, futurist, ecologist (well, attempting), journalist, gardener, chef, driver, swimmer, ex-surgery resident, occasional darts-player, German beer advocate and swiller, skier, hiker, surfer, sailor, snowboarder, bike-rider, enemy to a few, poet, wine-collector (and alleged connoisseur.)

Chattanooga's BDSM Resources

2007-05-09T12:19:00.000-04:00

Andromeda’s Picks for further information on BDSM in Chattanooga:
Books: (most of these are available on Amazon.com – no need to skulk around an adult bookstore!) These are basic introductions; there are literally thousands to peruse.
“Screw the Roses, Send me the Thorns” by Phillip Miller and Molly Devon – funny, informative, relaxed. A good beginner book.
“SM 101: A realistic introduction” by Jay Wiseman (and other books by the same author.) This man has been part of the “scene” for decades and, though I find his prose style a little repetitive and plodding, he does cover most of the bases and lots of the history since the 70’s. Good Reference.
“Sensuous Magic” by Pat Califia is a wonderful introduction to SM in the opening chapters, especially for a couple where one of the partners may be farther along the path than the other, but it doesn’t skip the more intense stuff. Pat is a wonderful writer and she (now he) has great fiction out there. Highly recommended books include “Macho Sluts” (short stories) and “Public Sex” (essays about how society tries it’s darndest to force our sexuality into safe pigeonholes, and how to fight back.) A real inspiration.
“The Marketplace” by Laura Antoniou is the first book in the marvelous Marketplace Series. The first book is a little bit draggy, but she gets her feet under her with the second, “The Slave.” She is proof that good SM fiction can be written that is not one sex scene after another, yet holds your interest with fleshed out characters. Other books in the series – “The Trainer,” “The Academy” (a favorite, but read the others first to understand it better), and the “Reunion.”
“The New Topping Book” and “The New Bottoming Book” by Hardy (formerly Liszt) and Easton are both excellent guides to the respective sexual roles and should both be read, no matter your preference, to better understand the allure as well as the responsibilities of assuming each role. It helps they have a sense of humor.
“The Story of O” by Pauline Reage -- the book most of us who ever fantasized about sadomasochism have read before. If you have not, it is the basis of much modern BDSM fiction.
Movies: (Also mostly on Amazon.com)
“Preaching to the Perverted” a British film and very funny, newly released and well worth the price for those who want a fun look at kink, not some overpriced porn without a plot. One of my favorites just for the puns in it.
“Beyond Vanilla” Fairly introductory, more a series of interviews than a movie, but will provide some information to a newby, not to someone who’s been in the scene a while.
“The Story of O” a 1975 French art house flick that did it right! Very well done and realistic (within it’s story) – just now out on DVD. Has a plethora of sex and bondage, etc., but is also very sensual.
“Tokyo Decadence” 1993 – very sexy story of a call girl who specializes in BDSM, in the over-jazzed Tokyo of the 80’s, and her slow spiral into madness. Very attractive. Mixed reviews on Amazon, but an old favorite.
“Fetishes” is an HBO documentary about the workings of a BDSM house in NY. Very informative and lets you see how the women feel about their roles. Lots of actual scenes since most of the men wore masks, etc.
ANYTHING by Maria Beatty. She is lesbian, but into leather and fetishes and her films are often silent (with great music) and black and white, but very sexy, very intense. Done with actors who are really into the scene. “Berlin 1927” is her newest, and she has several compilations of her usually short films (20-30 minutes each.) Can be found on Lesbian Nation on-line.
Many, many more -- there are lists on Amazon that can guide you.
On-line:
Bondage.com – heavily weighted toward the Southeast, and a good place to learn the ropes (pun intended) – just be careful out there, people! The site has some excellent forums, and libraries of information.
Alt.com – similar format to B.com, larger group, I think, and, again, being a member gives access to all sorts of extras.
TCE or the Chattanooga Exchange is the local munch group. They prefer to screen people individually before accepting you on-line, so contact me at and I will do my best to get you on the mailing-list if you wish to meet with them.
Same caveat applies to both these sites. If you are new to the BDSM scene – be VERY careful about what information you post concerning yourself, some sharks do patrol these places – ex-spouses, blackmailers, people who are NOT nice, those looking for victims rather than playmates or dates. Statistics in general have shown no higher rate of pathology in the BDSM community than the at large (“vanilla”) community, but, also, no less.
Give yourself an alias, be very general on your profile as to geographic location and, until you are sure you want to get involved with the scene, no pictures. Also, screen all the mail sent to you (i.e. check out the other person’s profile) before you reply to all those invitations to “play.” Read what’s available in their on-line libraries – lots of good advice and information there.
Local Clubs:
Allen Gold’s Discotheque – a mixed scene club in downtown Chattanooga, 1100 McCallie Ave. on the south side (left) as you drive toward downtown. 629-8080. It’s open 7 days a week, and is mostly gay. Yes, it has a cover charge. If you can’t go there with an open mind, then don’t go at all. You’ll see a variety of people and orientations, so be friendly. Lots of dancing and a relaxed, accepting atmosphere.
Images on Brainard Rd. (sorry don’t know the address, but they are in the phone book). Has one of the best parade of queens you’ll find. Stylish and sexy and, often, very talented. Great show every night and you’ll feel comfortable even if you are not gay. Just make sure you are equally comfortable with all gender presentations and bring lots of dollar bills for the ‘girls.’

Loca Luna isn’t physical store anymore, but you access it on-line (localuna.net) and Mr. Cameron will be willing to answer any questions or order any gear you need not available locally.

Last night's flight

2007-05-09T04:49:00.000-04:00

Flew again last night and managed about 13 minutes. Not great, but considering that Carl (an XC comp pilot) and Eric (a very experienced local pilot) did the same, and the two of them whacked, and the fact that I timed my launch as then new thermal cycle was beginning, thus leading the guys behind me into the gnarly little thermal that I worked practically to the ground, I don’t feel very bad. I had a good launch, in fact, got complimented on it by Gordon (the chief instructor) later, and a good two or three step landing. It really is easy to time the landings in this new glider, now that I’ve adjusted the hang-point so that I’m not flying so fast. Mustn’t pat myself on the back too much, but it felt so good, again to fly.

Tom got 4500 over and flew over an hour, and Scott got to 5700 and flew up the valley about 30-45 minutes. Both came down glowing. Tom and I sat on launch watching the sunset with Emmalina, who, I had decided, needed a little away time from her brother. She thoroughly enjoyed being the center of attention for once, as people came and went from launch, including a twosome (not a couple, think more like cousins) from Vermont and New York, Susannah and Tom. Susannah has been taking lessons and is now a Hang 1, and Tom starts on Thursday in ground school. They’re here only a few days, but I can tell it’s dream of hers.

We sat discussing how hard it is to only come for a few days and how it feels as fi you’ll never clear the hills. I told her that it took me more than 160 hill flights over 18 months to clear the hills, but that it is definitely worth it; that when she has that first evening sunset flight when the air is golden like honey and you look down on the darkening valley and it seems you can't find down if you want it, then she will realize all that sweat was for something tangible and rich.

Flying Season Again!

2007-05-08T10:23:00.000-04:00

I haven't been on much, not even on Bondage.com due to great flying weather, a new glider, work and multiple family obligations (i.e a wedding and a funeral.) But have flown more than 7 times on my new glider since I got it in February and today looks like another great day. Also, my birthday is coming up on Thursday and I want to try to fly on that day. Always a good omen when you fly on your birthday -- my little superstition is that you will fly the rest of the year. It's a clear blue sky, and light winds. See ya

Introversion

2007-01-07T18:34:00.000-05:00

Have known I was an introvert all my life, but this is pretty succinct, and has a sense of humor...

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200303/rauch?ca=0aveuVsO8PwfJHjAQ0qKEW7PnFcrBptE29Z2ByLMSMo%3D

The Pozo-Seco Singers

2007-01-06T22:28:00.000-05:00

For the record, this is one of my favorite albums, well the second half of the double album in this CD. A special favorite is "Mary Jenkins" which seems to relate a sinfgle day in a woman, probably a mother, burying her son in the aftermath of either WWI or the Civil War. I find it and "Johnny" unutterably poignant. You can find the combined album at either:

http://amazon.com or http://cduniverse.com .

Mom bought it around 1969 and I played the hell out of it during my Simon and Garfunkel period in the early 1970's. If you've never heard it, treat yourself, especially, "Mary Jenkins."

Toxic Work

2007-01-03T19:04:00.000-05:00

Finally came clean to my new boss and myself that this place feels toxic anymore. It's not about how good you do your job, it's about micromanagement. Don't know if it's this way at all hosptials but it feels as if (in modern medical management) the tail is wagging the dog. The business part of medicine has overwhelmed the calling of medicine, and belive me, it is a calling. How else at 0300 with your hand up someone's butt trying to retreive some object that shouldn't have been there to begin with? I don't mind that aspect of the job per se, it is rather that the management of hosptials now is left in the hands of business professionals rather than anyone who actually understands that no matter what the DRG's say to you you can't send home an eighty-five year old with a new pelvic fracture on simple pain meds and expect that she's gong to get better. It ain't gonna happen and money or no money the lady needs to be in the hosptial. This country is going to have to decided if little 'inefficient' hospitals are worth saving or do we need to close down all these smaller places in favor of the MegaMedCenters that will be miles away when you need them. Perhaps that is what the taxpayers of this area do want, but I think they'll regret it when they have that emergency in the middle of the night.

NaNoWriMo and Simon Benson

2006-11-10T11:58:00.000-05:00

We interrupt this Nano session (trying to make up for the extracurricular play session engendered by my selection of reading material last p.m.) for the announcement that I am surprised to find myself still dripping from the House of Gord bondage video we watched last night just before he bound me in multicolored rope, cupped various protruberant spots until they spurted or leaked, then vibrated me into a near faint while caning me. I take full responsibility as I called him as he was making his way home and told him I'd just finished a little short novel by Simon Benson (or maybe he's just the illustrator) called "Hanoi Hilton." I have NEVER had a rubber fetish, but I do now. God, there were some really nasty scenes in that book, and the illustrations were perfect. Ahh, now back to my novel....

Breast Torture

2006-10-19T20:39:00.000-04:00

Not my favorite day. Not a disaster. I worked well, but I had to get the mammogram done that wasn’t done, when I had it scheduled on Tuesday, due to over-scheduling myself for teaching the ACLS class, going over all the latest, greatest of same on my computer (which only downloads at 56K since I have dial-up in the back-end of GA and every one of the fourteen or so filmettes I’m required to review before I can certify that I am still certified in the art of trying to put humpty-dumpty back on the wall, required at least 30 min apiece) the cleanup behind and of the two new pooping puppies, the book club meeting at my house, etc. So, I thought, I’ll just pop over and get that Mammogram done on as an outpatient while I work – go over on lunchbreak. Of course not, it can’t be that easy. No, since the tissue in my breasts is very dense (as, I suspect, am I for allowing a PA to make me go through this) the mammograms have always been a little problematic. Unlike most people I don’t have very tender breasts, so the procedure itself is not difficult, just the fact that they can’t see anything. So, then they have to do an ultrasound, which doesn’t tell them what they need to know except that we (both the ultrasonographer and I) both feel several discrete lumps, none of them indurated or dimpled or…whatever. So then we need more views of the mammogram, Finally, Dr. H, himself, (the mammogram guru) comes over and manipulates my suspect right breast (which tries to look as innocent as possible and claim all the lumps are due to my Dom loving breast torture) and can’t seem to find anything definitive and tell me I really, should, go over to their new state-o-the-art digital mammography unit out in the ancillary hospital(where I was scheduled, originally, on Tuesday) to get a better mammogram. So, after having three people mash, manipulate, peruse, and handle my breasts (especially the poor right one) while I philosophically look elsewhere doing my best not to think too much on cancer, we all agree that I will schedule myself and do all this again next week, the sword of Damocles hanging over my head while I work all weekend and still can’t feel the definitive “lump.” I have lots of ‘em. Damn it.

September morning

2006-09-22T23:14:00.000-04:00

Feels like a real September morning. Like when we met. I want to wander through the streets in love, seeing what there is to see and walking about hand-in-hand and poking into small shops while wearing our fetish clothes and making people smile or scowl. All a matter of fabric -- just how you sew a piece of leather together. In a shoe, it’s uptown, in a vest or harness, its kink. Still the same cow's hide.
I want to lay in our warm bed in the morning twilight and feel his heart beat through the walls of his chest. I want to lay beside him for hours, forever, knowing that his eager cock will be there time after time when I roll over; if I sleep It will nudge me awake, it will dive between my legs forcing them apart. It will seek my inner folds and find them wet, and he will laugh and call me his little slut for wanting him so much. Then he’ll confine me to the room, naked and go and fetch us food and coffee, laced with Bailey's, from the cold kitchen while I listen to his footsteps --wondering what he has planned for us next, what scandalous thing he force me to do next to please him. Walk down Broad Street naked except for a vinyl dress and heels, dance with a gay man in drag, bend over just far enough for the man eying me opposite to see my clit hood piercing? Will he make walk about with a collar on in public, will he direct me to the tattoo/piercing parlor to stare in horror at the pain awaiting me if he gets me further pierced? Then, smile at my face. This is what I want.

Something from Lady T

2006-08-24T00:27:00.000-04:00

You Are a Pegasus

You are a perfectionist, with an eye for beauty.You know how to live a good life - and you rarely deviate from your good taste.While you aren't outgoing, you have excellent social skills.People both admire you - and feel very comfortable around you.

What Mythological Creature Are You?

To my baby sister

2006-08-20T18:17:00.000-04:00

I think I finally get why liberal white people are sometimes the bane of POC activists. I was reading the last few chapters of March by Geraldine Brooks where she has constructed a fictional interposition of what happened to the chaplain father of Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women,” The Reverend March, when he went off to serve in the Union Army.

He had, many years before, made the acquaintance of a young woman slave who he greatly admired for her intelligence and grace; had been driven towards her when, as a Yankee peddler he had stopped for a few days at the plantation in Virginia. Many years later they met at the same plantation which was serving as a field hospital at the site of a battle, and she as a nurse. Again, they nearly gave into lust, but circumstances wrested them apart. When he next met her it was a convalescing soldier after a stint in the South as a teacher and preacher to ‘contraband.'
His family had been involved for many years in The Underground Railroad, and had been supporters of most the major abolitionist activities over the years, but he had immense sense of responsibility (or, perhaps, ego) and a sense of failure over his many shortcomings, or failures to act, and his guilt all but dripped from him. She, despite her many painful turns in life, knew that “of things in this world, some are within our power and many are not.” (Epictetus)

She tries to point out to him that their time together is past and that he must stop beating himself up for the many human weaknesses he has displayed – cowardice, lust, lying – and go forward with his good works, perhaps with his image of himself tarnished, but with his good will to do useful and generous things intact. He proposes to go out among the newly organizing colored troops to work and teach.

But she cuts him off, a little angrily, “ We have had enough of white people ordering our existence! There are men of my own race more versed in how to fetch and carry than you will ever be. And there are Negro preachers aplenty who know the true language of our souls. A free people must learn to manage its own destiny….Go home, Mr. March,…If you sincerely want to help us, go back to Concord and work with your own people. Write sermons that will prepare your neighbors to accept a world where black and white will one day stand as equals.” Sometimes you read a whole book for a paragraph or two like that.

This is what my baby sister was saying one day to me when she explained that she could not proselytize among white people about race, that I, and others like me, must do the talking. That she had her own fields to plow.

I also saw, to me, glaringly, and shudder to think I may have voiced similar things, that a white liberal who must remind you of his or her liberalism with long recountings of their sufferings for Your cause (as if the cause against hatred and ignorance is not for every one of us born to this planet, this species) is not unlike the stereotyped Jewish mother. “Oy, the terrible pangs I endured just to bring you into this world, the nine months of suffering to support you, the years of educating you and doing without things for you and worrying about you and working my fingers to the bone to keep you clothed clean and fed, and this is the thanks I get?!”

(As Alexander is purported to have said of his own mother, “She charges a high price for nine months rent.”)

While appreciative of the efforts and fumbling attempts at understanding, People of color, the GLBT community, the impoverished, and all other such communities outside the mostly white, mostly straight, mostly male power structure, wish whites who had a choice on how to live their lives would take ownership of their own choices, including the choice to suffer whatever it was, and allow them to do the same (and stop telling them about it.) And allow them the ‘adulthood’ to determine their own agendas for the future.

Ahh, baby sister, I think I finally get it.

Single-tail

2006-08-13T16:53:00.000-04:00

Between the party and helping organize it, and the afterparty, and helping hostess it, and the loss of my puppy in July, two sets of houseguests since then, and the arrival of my mother, it had been too long for something unplanned.
So, we sashayed down to 1763 (www.1763.net) in ATL last p.m. and played with some of the TCE group and introduced a newby to the club, and I got myself another single-tail whipping to add to my list. While I was a little afraid to play with someone who was a) a new partner, and b) I had never even seen play and c) was already a little whipped (full pun intended), I knew the gentleman's reputation. His nickname is 'Fluffy' if that gives you any idea. When he wandered onto the establishment's patio with his single-tail, looking all forlorn because the rest of his contingent knew his skills and declined to be the subject of his interests, I was intrigued. We had met three years before and I had found him interesting, but other things in my life intervened. Now I looked toward Mister, certain he wouldn't approve, however, he was feeling mellow from our session (and the one he had done afterward on our guest) and told me to go ahead.
Now I was stuck. A little shaky from the previous events, and with more than a little trepidation -- any man who calls himself "Fluffy" is noone I trust with a light hand -- But you'll never know if you can fly until you jump from the cliff. So off we went. I let him know I liked to fight my bonds and that clips and cuffs were a necessary part of my head game. Sir would be monitoring and all I had to do was use my safe word. But, and this is a big but, we both knew it as a challenge. And I don't like to call uncle over a little blood. He had at me in skilled, but strong hand, for what felt like twenty minutes and left many marks that were admired by sundry, counting wasn't even part of it. He was finally kind enough to call for a break when he saw me shaking all over. I don't know if I would have called 'yellow' or not, or just fainted trying to keep up my self-image. But, with two play sessions in less than 2 hours I was happy to relinquish my fantasies developed from gay leather novels of weekend-long whippings and bondage, and retire peacefully to the nearby hotel to admire my marks and bask in the afterglow.

Loca Luna and Buck Wild's Party 30 July 2006

2006-08-02T13:49:00.000-04:00

What a kicking party! Absolutely what we hoped for and got. LOts of people out in their gear, lots of people that we know and like, no major drama, some killer acts -- The take-off on "Springtime for Hitler" that was dedicated to Cam's BD, Insatiabel Amazon's violet wand (static electricity) play, Mistress T's flogging an whipping of Rose, a red-haired beauty, the Loca Luna Posse sashaying about in full costume, The belly-dancers, The White Lighning Burlesque, the Drag Queens. The list goes on and that was just the performers, the guest were often just asintersting. This was a good party!

I lied

2006-07-13T14:16:00.000-04:00

Right now, I do want more between me than just latex. I want to be swathed in something fragile and light and weightless and surrounded only by the happy sounds of locusts humming in the July heat and a small dog crunching something smelly in the grass nearby....

Emma, just a dog

2006-07-04T21:15:00.000-04:00

nu=3279>533>:69>WSNRCG=3233599737653nu0mrj[1].jpg">
“Intersection”

It is as if you summon them both,
Calling them
both.
The car
Comes around the corner
or
plummets down the hill
or
appears from nowhere
just as she crosses the road
highway
street
boulevard
route
avenue
and
they

Intersect…

And
It is gone.
She is gone.
The Emma I had is not here.
She will never be
My wild and stubborn
Child.
She is broken like a an overripe melon, bruised on the highway.
Dropped.
I scoop her up,
But she will never be,
Again,
Emma.

And it doesn’t seem to matter that
She weighs in at
42 pounds.
The weight is as heavy as if she were my dead sister.

Gender is mutable

2006-05-17T20:55:00.000-04:00

“In my own little corner, in my own little chair, I can be whatever I want to be. I can be a fairy princess or a proud Egyptian pharaoh; I can be what ever I want to be.” Rodger’s and Hammerstein’s “Cinderella” (The quote may not be completely accurate, this is how I sing it in my head).

I am not required to know everything. (Just a little mantra for today)

Gender, during my yoga, suddenly seemed to clarify itself as I explained it to an imaginary man. It is mutable. If you doubt this or think of it only as a surgical modification, think of men who develop breasts as they get fatter. It’s not just fat, it’s the estrogen in the fat that is stimulating the growth of breasts.

Or perimenopausal women who become more aggressive and develop mustaches or demanding libidos. As their hormone levels drop, the relative amount of testosterone in their systems rise and they respond to that.

We talk of gender as though it was permanent, but what we mean is the equipment. The identity itself changes many times.

This is what Kate Bornstein was trying to tell me in “My Gender Workbook” , which book I had vainly tried to understand for the last two weeks, and, suddenly, it became clear.

Southeast Leatherfest and Chattanooga Fetish

2006-04-29T17:37:00.000-04:00

For those interested in more than just a fetishy party, check out the SouthEast Leather fest to be held June 6-9, 2006, in Decatur, just east of Atlanta. It's at www.seleatherfest.com

If you are local to Chattanooga, you should wander by Loca Luna on Brainerd (shamelss plug here) the only local fetish store. www.localuna.net

Just another type of normal

2006-04-27T08:57:00.000-04:00

The book “My Gender Workbook” is not making me uncomfortable, just not sure I share all her/his assumptions about what gender means since, in his/her mind, it seems to encompass all forms of power. People of color might argue that skin more than gender is the determining factor in their life. I think both, but they aren’t same in my book. And class, is that purely a function of the other two? It certainly plays into power. And, the newer studies that emphasize the differences in brain chemistry or whatever between the sexes feels like the old argument recycled. I think that the basic differences between us are those between human beings, not necessarily due to our genitalia, that between our ears or between our legs. That the difference across the spectrum of all XX females overlaps mightily with all XY males. That to come up with some ideal male to compare any other male against presupposes that there is an average to which all XY males should strive. How about we just all be human beings and acknowledge that some of us are shorter and less strong and that the bigger ones don’t need to take advantage of their size to get their way all the time, just as the smaller ones need to make an effort before helplessly dropping a task. Or figure out a smarter way to do it.

My body image horizons didn’t seem set beyond the fact that I wore my hair long at the requirement of my father and that we had to wear dresses to school and church, but somehow this didn’t feel like anything against me, more like the custom. As soon as I got home I was straight into play clothes and those were pretty much pants and old shirts. I climbed trees, road bikes, made up stories for my sibs to enact. Built forts and lean-tos. Harvested berries and made them into weird juice concoctions. Felt I could keep my family fed on what I had scavenged. Felt that I was strong and wiley enough as a pioneer to survive. Could cook pies and can, and studied pre-vet medicine in 4-H, aspired to be Tarzan, not Jane, and wanted to b an astronaut, wanted to be president and wanted to swim in the Olympics. Wanted to build a tree house and live in the country with my animals and one little girl with a visiting lover who would be and actor or a writer or a sailor. I wanted to fly, and did all those things. I wanted to travel, too, and do that likewise.

Bless my mother for giving me adventure books like “Bomba the Jungle Boy” (even I recognized it as racist before aged 12) and Marvel Comic Books and letting me stay up late to watch Star Trek and telling me when I asked why there were no female Tarzans, “Well, who’s stopping you?”

Actually I’m not conflicted about being a female. Rather it’s that I don’t feel feminine. I know that I am a woman, but I don’t feel womanly. I just feel like me. I don’t feel like a freak, I just feel I’m on the odd end of the spectrum, but still ‘normal.’ I’m not a man, but I feel echoes of manly things. I don’t think of other people as being more womanly, just of ‘acting’ more feminine, of liking, or (and this is what I sometimes believe) pretending to like, things that have been designated ‘girlish.’ I don’t value makeup, so I don’t put a lot of effort into learning to use it well. It’s not something in which I want to invest much of myself. On the other hand, I like clothing and sexy shoes. I feel I am a normal woman, just another type of normal.

FrolicCon 2006

2006-04-24T02:15:00.000-04:00

Yay! What a great weekend. I have bruises and cuts and memories to savor.

Got to play to three Doms at the same time on Saturday and we wore each other out. I think we all got what we wanted (only I got more!) It was delicious taking it all and wanting more, but knowing I was nearing the end when my muscles got to shaking uncontrollably. YUM.

Lady T and Mistress V and Sir tag-teamed me (after the first two had already had some time with me on Friday night) and between his knotted flogger and Miss V's single-tail on my back and Lady T's matching floggers on my breasts, I didn't really have any way to turn to avoid anything. Didn't want to, wanted all that energy. Like it best on my feet, not bound down. That way I can thrust myself back and tighten my grip on the chains to really throw myself into their rhythm. God, it was the first time in a long time when I felt I was giving something back, giving back some of the energy they were investing in me. Giving back to them who gave to me. I did it silently, my preference. Crying and groaning aren't my way, an occasional hiss, but I prefer to absorb it in silence -- the stoic side of me. I feel I go through an ordeal, challenge myself, and come out stronger. It was memorable and owe them all thanks.
More:
Friday night started us off. After getting off work, I sat in the front seat, passenger side, protected from his NASCAR-like driving only by my hybrid’s aluminum frame, crash-tested at, I’m sure, less than the 78-90 mph he was driving, the seatbelt, and the airbags. He likes to sit on people’s asses, which I interpret at anything less than 10 feet/10mph. This should have, by my calculations given us, at least at double wide MANUFACTURED home length of 70-80 feet. We were, by OHIO calculations, far enough back to only read the largest of the three bumper stickers of whomever he chose to follow. Let us say merely that both of us exceeded our limits, both hard and soft.
But, after we had each ground our teeth down further, we arrived at the Crowne Plaza for a weekend of .. frolicking? This didn’t actually sound like something that tow +40’s BDSMers would pay for. We had frolicked as infants and pre-teens, but at our age, we wanted something a little more hard-core than jumping about like bunnies and deer, never mind the other more orthodox reason for the weekend. But, frolic we would.
The evening started out with my frenetic unpacking – I don’t feel I’m inhabiting a room until I spread out my things in the appropriate place – i.e. where I can find them without rooting about in all my luggage, like some people I could name but won’t ‘cause they possess all the firepower in a BDSM sense. Then I registered. Being the dutiful convention-goer, I had already pre-paid which made this exceedingly painless. Then, to make everyone else at the convention more happy, I showered. All while my other sought out refreshments not normally listed on room service. He, also, came back legitimately badged and relaxed and we ordered in the usual overpriced, but sustaining, room service, too lazy to drive anywhere, before beginning the , for me, arduous process of ‘dressing for the evening.”
This is exacerbated by the fact that I am really a boy. Okay, not biologically, nor do I wish a sex-change, but I was raised by a mannish mother to who makeup was dishonesty and I dislike the feel of makeup, consequently I have never learned to properly apply it and I am a newby every time I open my moderately supplied (and old) makeup kit. Many of my cosmetics date from the mid-90’s, but are still functional. Having said that, that tells you how often I use them – for big dates and fetish events.
Now, hair is the next obstacle. I have very fine, though, thankfully, naturally blonde hair. Having naturally blonde hair has engendered even more laziness on my part since all I’ve ever had to do was grow it long, trim the ends, and wow most people with the blondeness of my blonde hair. And big breasts don’t hurt. So, there you are, the only things I like about dressing up is the clothes. I was a seamstress in theatre, college and semi-pro, for years and adore costumes. I started sewing at 6 years of age, so clothes are the thing that I can do, and he had bought me some really fine things in Amsterdam and for Xmas. That night we decided to wear his Xmas gift -- a turquoise brocade print of butterflies (chosen by me for my deceased sister whose animal was the butterfly.) I wear butterflies for good luck, and they brought me luck that night!
Shortly after application of all these things, after my analysis of myself in the mirror, after deploring, once more, my lack of makeup skills (and the fact that I had left any wigs or attachments back home by mistake) we sallied out to find friends (some from b.com, others from Chattanooga and Atlanta.) Not fifty feet from the crowded elevator (after a brief visit to the 2nd, party floor) we found C, Mistress V and Lady T of Atlanta, the first two friends dating back to Fantasm 2004, and Mistress V being the person who had given me my first single-tail whipping in Nov. 2004 at DomCon. (Something I had fantasized about all my conscious life.) After about five minutes he turned to them and left me in their ‘care.’ They all looked at him and asked, “Any limits?” He looked at me and smiled his evilest grin and then muttered some gibberish at them that amounted to , “Whatever you desire.” Or something so close to that it didn’t matter. Ye gods.
But, it took hours before we decided to check on those limits. We sashayed to the pool, C flirting with a handsome bisexual man that seemed to have the hots for anyone and anything. She was happy he sought her out, but then he seemed to wander off. Fickle.
We ended up in V’s room, After having shamelessly exposed myself at the some Tattoo Parlor’s room party, to get some wine for refreshment. After much catching up on gossip we went to T’s room where, while changing to more comfortable shoes, she lamented the fact that there didn’t seem to be anyone to ‘play’ with. Every one of the men she had flirted with or contacted seemed only to want to fuck. She was even considering calling in someone she hadn’t seen in a while just to have a target for her new dual floggers. She appeared to be so woe-is-me that I, valiantly I thought, offered myself as a substitute if she had no gender preference. We hadn’t seen my Dom in hours and they wondered if he had meant what he said. I assured him he wouldn’t have made the offer if he wasn’t sincere, but we decided to make the traverse to our room to make sure he wasn’t up there worrying.
He was there, and being it was nearly one a.m., was tired and offered me as a gift, so long as they didn’t break me. The two Dommes (C. had wandered off to sleep, having to man a booth in the a.m.) smiled Cheshire cat smiles and promised to bring me back ‘more or less’ intact. I shivered, but was very wet with the idea of two playing with me. We stripped me down in the room and clad me in a velvet cloak. I trusted them both. And my trust was more than repaid. They were fabulously kind. I had asked them to start me off slow, but put no real limits on them except penetration, That, so far, belongs to him. They chained me to a St. Andrew’s cross, the first thing we saw available when we walked into the mini playroom, and the object with the most space about it for Miss V’s whip. They allowed me my pony gag (my favorite), had no blindfold, but closed eyes work well, and I didn’t want to stare into the eyes of the handsome long-haired man opposite me. The fun began.
First with a gentle spanking that soon all three of us doing the ‘bump’ in time to the music as they stood astraddle my spread legs on either side and ground their mounds on my thighs while increasing the tempo and power of their hands. After properly warming me up T began teasing me with her floggers, gently, lightly, then increasingly with sting, working my back from shoulder to thighs as I thrust my ass back, begging for more. The tempo in my head combined with the rhythm of her strokes and the cries around us to make it all wildly deliciously, I began to glow.
Not unexpectedly, but suddenly there was a brief silence as V unwound one of her working whips, then the crack near my ear as she warned me of her intent. Then she began to tickle me with light, stinging lashes, like fire ant stings without the aftermath. Quick tongues of flame that burned so briefly, then left a pleasant aftermath, not like the canes which I also love and dread. Canes hurt too long after the strike, so that you have a brief moment of “oh, no, then is going to hurt.” I don’t remember how long it went on, increasing in severity, though I know she wasn’t really trying to make me flinch, just teasing me and it was delightful. I felt like I was floating, watching all this from aloft. And though a few were more intense, it was never something I wanted to stop. I wanted more, and adored the crowd that had gathered when I opened my eyes. Exhibitionist.

The Wake

2006-04-02T12:33:00.000-04:00

D's wake was held yesterday at Lookout Mountain Flight Park, over 150 people were there to celebrate his life and the gift he gave us of an example of how to live a life.

This is an email I sent out thenight I heard of his death:
A., my next door neighbor and good friend, called me on the way home from work tonight to tell me that D. had died. He was with his daughters and at home, sleeping, when it happened. He had been expecting it and did his own way, not our the medical) way. Evaded hopsice and even ever admiting that the pancreatic cancer had recurred. Lasted 21 stubborn months, bless him.

I turned on the radio (satellite) in the car and the first station was CNN with some big report on the gangs of LA, and it was wrong so I punched in the button for the 1940’s station, one of my favorite when I’m feeling stressed as the music soothes me. Ray Noble was singing, “Good night, Sweetheart, sleep will ease your sorrow, good night sweetheart, until we meet tomorrow…” It was the right song, for he was just that, everyone’s sweetheart.

I awoke this morning, wondering what I could tell his daughters about their father. They knew him as a Dad, I knew him as a part of our family in the hanggliding community, where, despite his age, he could be eccentric, wild, youthful, himself, not old. I think that was part of the allure. He was always young, and didn’t want to hang with old people. Their life did not interest him. He was independent, adventurous, a traveler. He wanted to be different and so he was.

He evaded death any number of times, had had an open heart bypass before any of us had ever met him, then took up hanggliding at 65 when the FAA wouldn’t give him a pilot’s license due to his heart history. He was determined to stay in the air. He tried to kill himself hanggliding at least once, when he pounded into the ground trying to emulate one of our top pilot's low level landings, and bent his heartbolt in the process. A week later my ex and I had to threaten to cut his flying wires to keep him from launching again despite the small sheer hemorrhage he had sustained. Years later, while learning to ski in Montana at 72 he went over a cliff only to land in the crotch of a tree just eight feet below instead of the fifty he could have fallen. Still later he had resigned himself to death and turned into a recluse, so we dragged him out and to the doctors where it was discovered he simply needed a new heart valve and went on further adventures. The man was Rubbermaid.

Enough for now….

Goodnight, sweetheart, Goodnight.

The man basically showed us how to live and how to die. As he had his daughter tell us, "I wasn't always good and I didn't always make myself proud, but I did the best I could." And died without whimpering over the choices he had made. God love you, Opa.

The Kitty Cat Club in Munich

2006-03-21T12:31:00.000-04:00

Any kinkster would be proud of that place. Short of murder, almost anything goes. Piercings, brandings (didn't see any of the latter, but they showed a recent one on the website) fistings, whipping, sex, rope bondage (had to help rescue a fainted maiden), water and medical play rooms, glory holes, it just went on and on. And they were friendly to boot. Golly, Heaven on earth. www.kittycatclub.de

Has me looking forward to Froliccon in Atlanta next month:

It's not a War

2006-03-21T12:25:00.000-04:00

It's not a normal war. They aren't trying to invade and occupy us. It's more like an attempt to make us spend ourselves (our lives, money and liberty) in fruitless efforts to protect ourselves fromtheir threats. Trouble is that when somehting really big comes along that is a danger to a huge nuber of us, we havn't the resources to deal with since we've expeneded so much already. They achieve theri goal of disrupting our lives by having us running in circles.

"Do More; Want Less"

2006-02-09T21:20:00.000-04:00

10 days until the European trip and the main water line to the house is busted. If it wasn't for the fact that the line was built in 1981 when there was no water on this road and that a private line had to be run over 1/4 of a mile, and part of that line is now under the county highway (i.e. the part that broke) it wouldn't be so ill-timed. As it is, I will have to wait on the water company to install a new meter closer to the house, then pay the plumber to connect us back up, and all this while working most of the remaining days (mostly at night) until the trip. I'm already tired!

And the reason for the title is simply that it is my new mantra. All those years of buying and wanting freely have left me so deeply in debt that I am working to pay my debt rather than working for my future. The line can be interpreted several ways as in 'want less things' and 'do more with what you have' and 'spend less time wanting material objects' or 'spend less time wanting to do a thing (such as writing), and more time just doing it.'

It's a slow process to learn that wanting a thing is not the same as needing a thing.

Androgyne

2006-02-06T15:35:00.000-04:00

Got some good advice from bondage.com about various groups that support those of us who feel really androgynous. Not that I want to be transgendered, just that I fell like a character in the Ursula K. Leguin novel, "Left Hand of Darkness" where the people of the planet are both and neither male/female and enter a state of 'kimmer' when they are due to mate. They flex between the roles, maybe mothers one time, fathers the next. I've felt in 'kimmer' my whole life and when I read the novel in the 70's it was as if she had put down on paper my own confusion. Posted on bondage and got several thoughtful comments and some advice. Have just signed on to this group, which might help others: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ANDROGYNE/

Brotweiler

2006-02-02T01:50:00.000-04:00

It was a wonderful weekend when I got back. I slept most of two days, made love all day Sunday (when not sleeping) and have walked and played with the new puppy the remainder of the time. Our vacation starts in less than three weeks and I feel like Christmas is actually coming!

The new dog has made such a change in my outlook at home. Though we have all the puppy troubles -- housetraining is still a matter in flux -- she is so much fun to play with and watch grow and has such a determined personality (one reason we picked her form the litter.) I realized I hadn't really trained a puppy since the Bassett Hound (a stubborn and lovable beast) I had in the early 80's, and puppies are not like kittens. (God, kittens will spoil you.) But, having said that, she's just so much darned fun.

I had wanted a Bassett again and he tried to find one that needed adoption, but I will not pay for a dog (other than pound fees) with so many homeless animals. We finally adopted a friend's mixed Rottweiler puppy ony to fihd out the father was, probably, a Bassett mix himself. So, he got his Rottie and I got my Bassett (she's a bit short in limb.) I told him just to tell everyone she's a Brotweiler.

Work, work, work

2006-01-22T16:58:00.000-04:00

It's January, the dark days of the year, when old people die and the flu becomes a reality, and there seems to be nothing but work, work, work. It's too long to summer and too many bills and taxes ahead. Want less and you'll spend less and then you get to work less. Makes sense on the paper or screen. But, I am too tired after working all my shifts at my main job in the first three weeks, cooking a gumbo dinner for the book club from scratch (very successful, I might add) then flying out of ATL after finishing a night shift to SD to work a string of twelve-hour nights here.

And the remark about the old dying was personal. A dear friend who persistently denied having cancer made it through the holidays (as I predicted) and died on the 15th, aslo as I predicted. He was a stubborn and adventurous man, learning to hangglide after open-heart surgery at 65 and ski at 72. He was almost 79 when he succumbed. But he fought it until after he had his family safely past the holidays. Bless him. After my neighbor called with the news at 1115 p.m. I turned on the XM radio for the long drive home from work and heard, "Good night, Sweetheart, sleep will ease your sorrow...Goodnight, Sweetheart, good night." Sounded like D was talking to me....

Springlike and work

2006-01-04T13:06:00.000-04:00

It's gorgeous, in the 60's (when it should be 30's F) but I have to go to work in the middle of the day (I have a difficult time transitioning to mid-day shifts. Fine with night, though I am a day person, but there's something so wrong about having to start to work in the middle of a day!) At least with nights I can fool my body by taking a brief nap before I get started. But he and I both awakened about 0930, had a tasty session (which left me feeling warm, fluffy, and DRAINED) then had to regroup for work. Fortunately, the new schedule (for good or ill) only requires us to stay for ten hours. I've never had an eight or ten hour shift in all my career. So used to twelves, don't know what it will feel like, except, I hope, short! Happy New Year, and hope you are accomplishing those things in your life that count -- love, creativity, friendship, and health.

Where's my Christmas Spirit

2005-12-23T22:14:00.000-04:00

Dang, can't seem to find that Christmas spirit. I know I laid it around here somewhere, but I'd really like to have it now. I just feel blah, tired and worn out with trying to work, shop, decorate, cookie back. I'm on tonight (Friday the 23rd) and Christmas Eve night, and then we will open presents Christmas morning when I get off work before driving all the way to OH to see his family. I plan on champagne and a fire in the stove while we open presents, apporpriate music, then I will nap all the way to Ohio, it's better that way when he is driving like a bat out of hell, and he will, being that it is Christmas and during the day the interstates are usually very clear that day. We've made the trip before. The only thing left to do is to wrap his last few gifts and pack, neither of which I had the heart to do today, though I got the last few dozen gingerbread (made 73 dozen this year)deliveries completed.

But Christmas morning, I'm putting him in charge. I refuse to do any further planning and want to be the child -- he can be in charge of who we visit in Columbus, and I will tag along. I will take along a few books and nibbles, one trashy outfit, one dressy one, some warm gear, and the rest is up to him!

I just want my Christmas spirit back!

Indeterminate Gender

2005-12-17T20:30:00.000-04:00

No, this is not about physically indeterminate gender, nor about feeling I was born in the wrong body. Trouble is as facile as I believe myself to be in the English language, I have never met with recognition when I discuss this issue (if it really is an issue, rather more a conundrum) with counsellors, family, friends, fellow kinksters.

I have never felt particularly that I was male or female. I mean, in my head, I am just me. Me is any and all and both. I don't know how to explain it becasue it is so core to me. I don't want to be a male, though my alter ego is male, rather I feel I am between the sexes. The best image I have come up with (and this is just a fantasy to try to explain this mindset) is that in my last life I was male and I've been sent to this life, this body to learn what female is. But someone forgot the guidebook.

I feel comfortable with both men and women; can't pick one over the other for preferences, though I am not very bisexual (occassionally strong, mannish women attract me.) I am quite happy with sex, and my dom doesn't seem to care if I'm in boi or girl mode.

I hasten to add that this body is very much a female's, but my visual image of me is more like Legolas in LOTR, in fact, he teases me by calling me his 'Orlando Bloom with tits.' {Funny that, Orlando, I think of the Virgina Wolfe novel.} Or, if you have ever read Leguin's "The Left Hand of Darkness," I think of myself as continually in kimmer -- my mental image of me shimmering between male and female constantly so that I can never get a clear glimpse of it.

Why bring it up? For the same reason we wander on the sites like bondage.com -- validation. Can't really expect advice, just wonder if others have ever experienced this without thinking they were in the "wrong body?" I don't feel it's the wrong body, just think my physical image doesn't match with my internal image at all.

"Wild Side Sex: The book of Kink"

2005-12-17T12:47:00.000-04:00

Midori, a well-known writer and teacher within the fetish/BDSM community, has put out a new book about the amalgam we call 'kink.' I'd never thought before of how this lumps together a whole sexual buffet that may, or may not, have much to do with each other. I have, by her lights, determined that I am a poly-fetishist, i.e. a whole lot of what is labelled 'kink' turns me on -- leathersex, bondage, piercing, tight-fitting elbow-length leather gloves, boots of all varieties, corsets, silk and fur and velvet, foot play, etc. There are very few of the kinks that don't hold some attraction (even if not strong) for me.

But, then, I've been an omnivore all my life -- I'll read anything, eat almost anything once, like talking to a variety of people, want to travel everywhere. It makes sense, therefore, that very little in the community shocks, disgust, or upsets me. And, truthfully, maybe a little of the attraction is my own exhibitionism. Since 'normal' society has only rarely ever liked and approved of me (I was raised a liberal in the deep South) it was just as well to hang with the outcasts and laugh back at society. Thank the goddess/god, that my mother was strong and willing to be different and an 'outsider' to remain true to herself. she gave me that as a gift. Peer pressure just never meant much, too much of a sacrifice to gain their apporval.

Her blogsite is here: http://www.livejournal.com/users/fd_midori/

I'm flying, but it's not from the mountain

2005-12-15T02:39:00.000-04:00

We've been going through some honeymoon spell the last few days. Don't know exactly what triggered it, but we've been playing like mad. Maybe it's the date I've made with him to meet me at the Read House in Chattanooga in a couple of days and play out a first date. We're pretending it's our first meeting (the one he was two hours late arriving at) all over again. I'm pretending to benew to bondage and he's pretending he's never met me before and we're going for drinks and flirtation before retiring (well, he's supposed to woo me into his love nest) where we will do unspeakable acts. Okay, I'll get tied up at some point and do a whole lot of grovelling and gasping, and breathing. Lots of deep breathing.

But all this is in reference to the fact that for the last two days I have felt as if everything tight and clinched in me had melted away. I've felt all warm and happy, whether being 'chastised' or discussing future genital piercings for Christmas.

Excerpt from the Nanowrimo project

2005-12-12T08:57:00.001-04:00

So she read the archetypes and the reasons for her kind of people, the ones who didn’t just want intercourse, but wanted something more who wanted to play ‘adult reindeer games’ and wanted to make up rules for themselves and names for themselves or new personas and who were happy to let others take over sexually, or even their lives, just to achieve this kind of sex. And then there were the spiritual seekers, the ones who wanted to achieve a higher consciousness by both sex and pain. In it all, she began to see herself as a variant of a ‘norm’ that she hadn’t realized existed, of a whole group of human beings, and not just a solitary wanderer, a misfit.
For years she had know about leather sex bars and wondered if she would ever have the courage to go to one, but just couldn’t figure if they or even swingers clubs still existed and how to get into them, or if, even given the opportunity, she world have the courage to go to one of them,. But now with the opportunity looming the only answer was “yes.” She would make the meeting.
She called him once a day that week, per his orders, she liked his voice and the one picture she had of him was quite attractive, but she realized it might be old and that might look nothing like him. She tried to be honest about her own looks but didn’t have anything but vanilla pictures to upload to the site and wasn’t quite ready enough for that to be part of her profile, so she compensated by the bluntness of her description. She wanted no disappointment when he looked at he for the first time. For her own part she figured she would be blindfolded , unable to tell black from white or old from young. Well-hung, yes, because, unlike many of the fraternity she was in no way interested in this without some orgasm occurring and unlike many of them she wasn’t gonna lie about it. The ones who insisted they wanted no sexual contact she viewed as self-delusional at best and outright liars on the other hand.

NaNoWriMo Concluded!

2005-11-30T19:34:00.000-04:00

I did it, I really, truly did it! I am so proud of myself, even if what I wrote is pure drivel, it's ten whole days and 50,000 words of drivel later and I wrote it all in big chunks without thinking too long and hard. I had an extremely basic idea when I started and just ran with it. It is so rewardijng to have finished a long story even though it may never see the light of day. Viva la creativity! Now off to London for a long weekend and a wedding.

Thanksgiving, NaNoWriMo, work and family

2005-11-23T02:01:00.000-04:00

All three currently consuming my time. I am working right now, and when I'm not, I'm doing time pacing to see how many words I can type in a given timespan to get more nanowrimo accomplished. I'm over 25,000 words today and so proud of myself since I started late! After working tonight I'm actually off for Thanksgiving for the first time in over a decade and I'll get to watch the Macy's Day Parade which was one of the high points of my Thanksgiving holiday, that and the little taste of Mogen-David wine (the only kind allowed in Mississippi when I was growing up) Mom always allowed us on Thanksgiving (and since my brother and sisters hated it, I got all their samples, too!) Also, I plan to start decorating the house for Christmas, try and get ahead on my Nanowrimo for the weekend and fly off on Friday to visit my nephew, his wife and their new baby girl, Jade, my foster granddaughter!

NaNoWriMo, part deux

2005-11-18T09:55:00.000-04:00

Not NOT writing, just spent 5500 words on nanowrimo (in less than four hours) trying to make up for my lack of an early start. It really is empowering to just get the words on a page, without looking up to see the typos, without worrying that what you are putting down has a plot, without wondering if anyone will read it and nominate you for the Nobel Prize or even whether the damned thing will ever see a printed page. How about just writing? Just writing is good, and this is a journey I've been promising myself this year, and i'm on it. Can't believe that the gods were kind enough last night to leave the ED mostly empty so that I could get that many words on paper. I've had writer's cramp from a pen before, but my fingers and joints are feeling this stient now. Ahh, jubilation -- I'm a quarter of the way through!

Yesterday's Meltdown

2005-11-02T14:09:00.000-04:00

Phewww, had a meltdown yesterday at work. Cried all night. Think my BP's up. need to remember Epictetus, "Of things, some are in our power, and others are not." from "Enchiridium."

Politicised

2005-10-30T20:46:00.000-04:00

I hadn't meant to become so politicised, but having a baby sister who is an activist and whose intelligence challenges your own and who make you think forces you to reexamine old arguments you've made, excuses that you've made to yourself in the past that saved you having to consider that the other person might just be right. At least as right as you are, maybe even, that you are wrong or misinformed or just ignorant. (A hard admission when one believes one-self congenitally honest and open-minded.)

Rwanda is the center of my reading at the moment and what happened there in the 90's. Phillip Gourevitch's book of essays/history was assigned for our reading this month by a woman who always gives the impression of a Gen X slacker with nothing more serious on her attractive mind than what boy she'll take to bed next in our little flying community. The book is called "We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow we will be killed with our Families." It's a mouthful of a title and so full of questions (and not bottled, prepackaged answers) that I'm reading it straight through, but having to stop frequently to breath and think and question myself and consider. I am fascinated (and maybe the sentence only functions within the context of the book) by his statement, "Power consists in the ablity to make others inhabit your story of their reality, even if you have to kill a lot of them to make that happpen."
"Power consists in the ablity to make others inhabit your story of their reality, even if you have to kill a lot of them to make that happpen."
Putting aside the triviality of what I'm about to say, but that's what advertisers (of cigarettes, etc.) do all the time. They retell our stories of ourselves to us so that we feel we will be truer to ourselves if we smoke Malboros or wear Vickie's Secret underwear or wear clothes that look like what Brad Pitt wears.

It's also about the bigger political stories. Male historians would allow for the occassinal exceptional woman -- Queen Elizabeth I -- but those were deemed rare and, in general, we were not expected to be wise or strong or athletic or stubborn or militant, or sexual, briliant, or inventive, or diplomatic, or skilled, or hilarious, or any of the other things we are learning we are and can be. We (the established culture) pretty up what the mostly white population did to the indigenous peoples of the Americas when we invaded their country and we try to tell African Americans that "it" wasn't so bad. Well, the truth is, "it" was so bad. "It" was so bad that people died rather than live like that. But we don't want to feel shame nowadays for something that happened before we were born, never mind the reverberations it carries for them today, so we tell them their story in our way until they believe it, or we kill enough of them off that they can't argue. Especially we kill off the uppity niggers and the Native Americans who try to tell us their version of events, their concept of what really 'went down' at Wounded Knee. They are too dangerous to Our stor; we can't allow them to speak because it puts us and our vision of our noble culture on shakey ground. We pooh-pooh the attempted revision of what we have come to accept as doctrine because it would feel dangerous, uncertain to question the version of events that we've been raised to believe is true, that is the groundwork of our "great" nation. I'm happy to live here, but then, I'm white.

Which brings me back to the book on Rwanda. It has raised questions about what we should and could do in a genocide. And what the president I thought was "okay" didn't do. He helped the Yugoslavians, after a time, but the Africans (and what is it about Africa that always reduces us to paralyzed shame and impotence?) were left to be slaughtered because it was too difficult and too far off for us culturally, and identity wise to bother to sort out who was shooting whom over what. And what about the Sudan? Too black, too mish-mashed politically to know that bad things are happening to a whole mass of people? Is it just because they are people of color, or is it because they seem so far removed from us and because we carry such guilt as to feel bereft of hope to even try to sort out what it means, what we can do. It doesn't help that the passionate advocates are only heard when things deteriorate to the point of needing outside help. We never hear of the Kashmiris until it is time for a war, we choose to hope it will go away.

I'm not done with this topic. Thank you baby sister.

My sister travels to New Orleans

2005-10-18T14:04:00.000-04:00

My sister, a poet and activist, and an all around fine person travelled to New Orleans earlier this month, to see what help she could provide. Like everyone in this family she has opinions, but she backs them up with action. Bless her and her vision and hr strength. She has granted me permission to cite her blog: http://www.livejournal.com/users/badsis/

Busy and flying

2005-10-16T19:09:00.000-04:00

It seems since the beginning of August I've been on the go, and it doesn't look to stop for several months. August in SD, then work, the trip to Biloxi after Katrina, then work, two trips in the last three weeks, one to Philly to visit a sister and attend a flying friend's wedding, then another to Orlando for a conference. In between I work, tomorrow is a class, and that's why when, yesterday, I had a chance to fly, I took it.

It was worth it, thought the air was not smooth and I spent the entire hour scratching on the ridge with a dozen (or two) others, near-missing each other since no one was high, and the conditions were borderline. Finally, when I felt myself break out in a sweat from low blood sugar (forgot to eat before launching) I decided I was a threat to aviation and went out to land about 7p. People flew until sunset, and, I suspect, after -- a full moon rose just as the sun went down behind the neighboring ridge.

Quotes

2005-09-20T00:12:00.000-04:00

Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them. ~Edward Roscoe Murrow, 31 December 1955

If we were to wake up some morning and find that everyone was the same race, creed and color, we would find some other causes for prejudice by noon. ~George Aiken

What is tolerance? It is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other's folly - that is the first law of nature. ~Voltaire

One day our descendants will think it incredible that we paid so much attention to things like the amount of melanin in our skin or the shape of our eyes or our gender instead of the unique identities of each of us as complex human beings. ~Franklin Thomas

I am an invisible man.... I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids - and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. ~Ralph Ellison, The Invisible Man, 1952

O Lord, help me not to despise or oppose what I do not understand. ~William Penn

If a white man falls off a chair drunk, it's just a drunk. If a Negro does, it's the whole damn Negro race. ~Bill Cosby

Abolition of a woman's right to abortion, when and if she wants it, amounts to compulsory maternity: a form of rape by the State. ~Edward Abbey

For every minute you are angry, you lose sixty seconds of happiness. ~Author Unknown

In certain trying circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate circumstances, profanity furnishes a relief denied even to prayer. ~Mark Twain

Malice drinks one-half of its own poison. ~Seneca

all of these and more at www.quotegarden.com

Vintage Champagne and making love to the sky

2005-09-19T17:47:00.000-04:00

Flying for two hours on Saturday the 17th was like flying in vintage champagne -- smooth, mellow, golden, bubbly. Silent and cool, but not cold. Handfuls of us scattered along the ridge, the sun at a low angle over Sand Mountain, us like dozens of butterflies, dancing and bobbing on the waves of the winds. And there was no need to fight this air. It carried us , gentle, like a well-trained horse who you shifted only by the shift of your weight. If you wanted t go 'there' you had only to think it and with fingertip pressure on the bar you were softly, smoothly 'there.' I felt the air and the glider talking to each other and I listened and we three, we flew.

Like the best days on the sloapes when your body and board and the snow have a conversation with no conscious component and you just are, sailing down the face of a mountain on a bed of white satin that welcomes the little track you leave on her face. Like lovers.

Part 4 of Biloxi and Katrina

2005-09-13T18:28:00.000-04:00

[This is a continuation of my previous post which I have been editing for the last week. Decided to go ahead and post under a different heading since the other was getting so long. Thus, if you wish to read what preceded this you'll have to go to the prior post. OK, legalese finished...]

The night was stagnant, and we got fewer patients in after midnight. Yes, some of them had the hopeless look, especially the elderly, but most of them were just looking for some help, none of them expected miracles of us. Unlike New Orleans, a large city, this is place was all about neighbors. Yes, southerners carry guns, and one had even posted the local motto on their battered housefront, "You loot, we shoot." But, they weren't really shooting at anybody. The people banded together, naturally, neighbors with an intact roof offered protection. Anyone with a grill cooked out for their friends. They pooled their gasoline to make inland forays for supplies. They bought ice as soon as roads opened, and guarded each others houses. They looked after their elderly neighbors, trying to keep them hydrated and cool in the heat. They fished out what was left of their lives from the wreckage, and they didn't sit around waiting on someone to show up to help. They never had trusted the federal government anyway, something about a war 140 years ago...

The DMAT team was great -- enthusiastic and willing and game. The pharmacy they set up dispensed need drugs, no questions asked. Antibiotics, insulin, BP meds lost in the rising water, needles, syringes, tetanus vaccine, asthma meds -- anything on their rather generous fomulary list was free to the survivors. I don't even think they asked for insurance cards. Wouldn't have done any good, mostly people didn't even have ID. We even gave out Benadryl, ibuprofen, children's Tylenol. All the little things you might pick up for yourself at a pharmacy had ot be provided -- the pharmacy we're in as bad a shape as most other buildings.

The DMAT team also took the load off the ED, seeing the mildly injured, or the worried who just wanted a tetanus booster, or helping those who really didn't know where to go get directions to the nearest shelters. They processed over 400 patients a day, dealing with the needs of two-thirds or more of them, only sending the truly ill in to us in the ED.

And among the ED staff were other types of volunteers. People like Cam and the respiratory tech and myself who had just taken into our heads to drive down after the endless pictures of people struggling with no help from the very ones we paid to provide for this sort of situation. Others, came by way of temp agencies, but came with the full knowledge that they'd have to deal with the heat, lack of facilities, lack of back up or technology to which most of us had grown accustomed. They were no less to be thanked just because they had the foresight to do it with pay. No one could pay them enough to stand about in the miserable heat, listening to the heart-breaking stories, go unwashed for days, leave their much more comfortable jobs, be required to come up with endlessly creative ways around the failed technology. Some physicians had come at the urging of their colleagues who couldn't make it on their own but were willing to cover shifts for them if they would just go and 'help those people.' Their professional colleagues.

The church groups -- The Salvation Army, the Catholic Churches, the Evangelicals, the Baptists and Methodists -- organized themselves to deliver care within hours, and organized their people to help dispense the clothing and food and water sent down from the north. However else lost the people were, they knew if they could make it to one of the local churches they'd get help and shelter and food.

So, let me clear up my motivations. I was not noble; I came down because I was angry with the Federal Government and the News Agencies, and I was curious. I knew these people from childhood and just couldn't imagine my father's family standing about waiting on the Federal tit to come down out of the sky to supply them sustenance. I got tired of the version of events that CNN and Fox and every other network was feeding us, drowning us with nightly, daily, images that seemed to say we were helpless and it was hopeless. I had to go see for myself. Maybe that is the root of all travel writing, all journalism. To go and find your own version of events, your way of seeing them.

So, am I here to contradict those pictures? No, because I wasn't there at the same time or in the same place, but I do want others to know that the story is not over nor as damned fucked up as it looks on the 6pm news. We may not have saved that many starfish, but, at least I can say we tossed a few back in.**

** Refers to a story that circulates periodically through the internet about an adult walking along a beach after a terrible storm has washed up many sea creatures above the high water line. Many of them are clearly dead or dying as he saunters past them. Ahead he sees a small boy bending down every few feet and tossing something with all his strength into the water's edge. The adult walks up, curious, "What are you doing?"

The little boy looks up and says, "Saving the starfish before the sun gets too high."

The adult looks at the climbing sun and says, "It's useless, you can't save them all."

The little boy bends down and flings a starfish into the surf, "Maybe not, but I just saved that one." Then he walked on to the next.

Driving to Biloxi and Katrina

2005-09-09T07:46:00.000-04:00

Okay, I couldn't stand it any more. After working nights the week Katrina hit, coming home and spending four and more hours a morning (when I should have been asleep for the next night shift), watching the latest depressing news from New Orleans, seething in rage at what I viewed as the incompetence of the elected officials, I finally looked at my boyfriend Friday night, as he looked at me, and we said, "Let's go." And it was decided.

Truthfully, we should have said something to our friends, and given them the chance to contribute to the expedition. But we moved so quickly and were feeling a little embarassed in our roles as 'angels of mercy,' that we just decided to collect (and buy) things we thought they could use -- diapers, formula, water, paper towels, toilet paper, and dry goods. (God, would we be sick of 'non-perishable food items' by the end of our little stent!) After waving goodbye to oru enighbors and supoorters, Ann and Barry, we headed south in his un-air-conditioned jeep at 8 pm on Saturday night, not sure what was ahead, but armed for everything from camping in the rough, to armed vigilantes. What we weren't prepared for was basically nothing. It was eerie driving through south Mississippi at 0300, after having heard in Meridian that it was dangerous to stop for anything, that people would rob you or even kill you for your goods and the gasoline in jerry cans we had lashed (under tarps) to the back of our trailer. It was very quiet with only occassional spotting of 18 wheelers barrelling off with goods in the night, and the equally infreqent convoys of trucks and vans, usually laden with supplies like ours, that passed us on Hwy. 59, then 49 out of Hattiesburg.

We saw plenty of destruction along the way, trees that had given up the fight, de-roofed houses, but no gangs or ravening hoards. Truckers in Hattiesburg warned us that we should have guns. We did. They warned us not to stop, and we listened, except for one quick pit-stop and gas tank refill in the Hattiesburg airport. Silent and well-lit. There was no gasoiline available south of Tuscaloosa. And the only place we ever felt threatened was at the last truck-stop west of Meridian where many of the mobile refugees from Louisiana seemed to have washed up. They seemed stuck, hanging about the nearly emptied store with no gas to carry them further. several of the young men seemed to eye our trailer a little too keenly, so he stayed in the jeep while I enquired within about road conditions and what lay ahead. Every time we moved forward it was an act of faith, and every time we saw headlights in the night coming up on us, it was with fear that we watched their approach. There would have been no one to help.

Finally we reached the coast and I-10, at least the portion between Gulfport and Biloxi was open. We had, originally, planned on driving to Baton Rouge to offer my services as a medical person, but after listening to Fox Radio and realizing thery were probably over-supplied there, I decided we might be more useful in the Mississippi Gulf coast. I had grown up in MS, attended professional school there, done my further training and my first job out of school over in nearby Mobile. This was my area of the country and I felt I owed them my first loyalty. We had expected to be stopped and inspected by the National Guard or the MS DOT or the Army, but there was nothing visible watching our approach except a couple of lighted and parked Hum-vees with guns displayed. We headed east on I-10 to Biloxi, having seen no town on the way that looked as if it were so devastated as to need us. We began to laugh that we might need to find some poor person and force him to take our supplies. Never fear, we had yet to reach the beaches. And, truly, we never did.

We didn't have the heart to go and stare at the devastation. It was bad enough a quarter to half mile inland. We drove over the I-110 bridge down into Biloxi and headed back toward Keesler becoming lost amidst the broken houses and finally asking a police officer, parked and watching us on the side of the road. I guess he figured if we were looters, we were going about it in the wrong fashion, importing goods, and he didn't seem particularly disturbed by our sudden appearance at 0400 on a Sunday a.m. He turned out to be one of a contingent of South Carolina police sent to relieve the stressed and over-worked force in Biloxi, many of whom had no homes to go to, had been up and unbathed for 6 days, and had no imminent prospect of a bath or a permanent home. He kindly directed us to Keesler AFB where we had (erroneously) been informed they were doing the medical triage for the region. But the gate sentries sent us on to the local hospital. Paydirt.

A DMAT team from Ohio, sent out by FEMA (yes, the same ones we had labelled 'feeblema') had dispatched them almost as Katrina left the area. They were triaging in the Emergency exit to take the load off the ED. It was the only brightly lit and (as far as we could see) inhabited space in a dead town. But it was the right place.

We drove up to an interested audience, obviously most of their patients were in bed for the night. (We later learned there was an 8pm-6am curfew, though the police would take you to the hospital to and from the shelters.) They watched us in curiosity, most of them in a uniform that identified them as part of a DMAT team out of Dayton. I felt a little shy, and tired, we had been running on adrenaline for almost 24 hours (and the whole week had been draining), but he just jumped right in. Soon we were chatting with the night rep who, while unable to take our supplies, was able to direct us to the police sergeant who could. When she learned I was a doctor, down to offer my services, things looked up. She made us promise to return whenever the police were finished.

While she was calling around, we got into a conversation with the DMAT team members and another self-propelled volunteer (respiratory therapist) from FL. Like myself he had trained in Mobile and felt a certain loyalty to the region, and, we soon realized, he had worked at the same hospital during the same era as I had. In fact, we had even been named in the same lawsuit. [It had been dismissed against me after preliminary depositions (I had only been the physician who showed up to the code) but he had had to go through the whole trial process before the case against him was dropped at the very end.] We both laughed and hoped the next time we saw each other we'd have something else over which to reminisce.

My boyfriend, originally from Ohio, was having his own 'old home week' with the team from Dayton. Soon, however, we were following "Curly with a K" to the disaster building as the sun started to rise. Behind the police department was a Catholic school that served as one of the distribution point for goods/food/water. As we drove through town more of the shattered old trees became visible. The whole town had a feeling of a junkyard. Everything was frayed, rubbed raw by the winds or seawater, refrigerators, stoves, carpeting, panelling, fixures, cabinets, all stripped form their water-damaged homes, sitting in disconsolate heaps before them. Downed power lines, like live oak moss, dripped down from aboveus; we swerved repeatedly to avoid them.

PART TWO

We arrived at the PD/Disaster Management Center to find another couple with a fully loaded truck of supplies. The Biloxi police unloaded us both with alacrity, taking the scarcer (and, therefore, more valuable) baby supplies inside. Large flats of bottled water stood everywhere and people walked around constantly with one in their hands. It reminded me how dehydrated I felt after a night of warm drivng with the air battering me from the open car windows and it was already getting warmer which magnified my sudden exhaustion. What I really needed now was a nap, but the cold beer he had packed seemed equally inviting. But where to consume it in front of folks who were glad for just the water? We asked Kurly and he laughed. "We'd all have one with you if we weren't on duty." We drove over to park under a decapitated ancient live oak at the back of the lot, and quietly sipped on a Heineken as we stared about us in the gathering light.

A man whose still-standing deck abutted the parking lot seemed to be cooking breakfast on his grill outside; there were no lights on in his house. He was in dirty shorts, shirtless in the heat, and wearing slippers that looked suspiciously like hospital issue. He laughed with a friend as they both watched us surreptiously drink our beers. If we'd thought to, we'd have packed more than a six-pack. When the police drove up or passed us various times, they always stopped to say hello, and thanks for coming to help, and not a one of them seemed to care about the beer-sipping occurring on official land, but we kept it to one beer anyway. I was fading fast.

We returned to the hospital as we'd promised V. (the night rep) after Kurly had told us he didn't think there were any safe places to set up a tent in their area. When we mentioned it to V, she also shook her head, but told us we could have an unoccupied room upstairs. Apparently about half the homeless nurses, techs, etc., were residing in the hospital, both because they had no other place to go and for convenience should they be required for some serious emergency. I also introduced myself to the administrators, nursing and otherwise, who looked, in dishevelled shorts and limp tee-shirts as if they, too, had been living at the hospital. My licenses were inspected, and my ID check before they asked me when I could work. I felt pulled to start right then, there were dark circles under many of the eyes around me, but knew I'd be a much better docotor for a few hours nap. I asked for a night shift, which turned out to be just fine with all the permanent ED physicians.

They had been there, more or less without break, for 6 days. All of them had lost their houses and had had to ship their families out of town. None of them had any place to stay, and lived at work. Unfortunately, the hospital cum dormitory had no running water, intermittent electricity, and only port-a-potties for toilets, even for the walking patients. Everyone had done their best, but showers were usually 'in a box' or consisted of baby wipes. No one smelled 'ripe,' but no one smelled daisy fresh either. Hair styles among the nurses were along the creative "Survival" modes -- many braids, kerchiefs, spiked, slicked down really flat. Anything to disguise the fact that the nearest shower and shampoo was several counties away.

We were also hungry about this time, having only had one sandwich en route to the Coast, and that one about 9p the last night. By the time we got settled in the patient room with our inflatable (and never used mattress -- the narrow hospital bed was much more confortable than the cold floor) we were trying to make ramen noodles with an inverter and heating element. Not very sucessfully. Finally, by inquiring (he was good at that) we determined that there was one working microwave and nuked the water for my lunch before tucking me into bed while he went off to satisfy his curiosity. I slept fitfully with constant din of crying babies, overhead announcements and construction noises as the workers continued through the long Sunday afternoon to repair the roof and electrical wiring. The generator they used was effective in keeping a temporary AC going, sometimes a little too well, but no one wanted to complain that it was 'too cold.' After the week before, in stupefying humidity and heat, that would have been sacrilege.

I awakened to a supper of peanut butter crackers, the summer sausage we imported, and bottled water before reporting to the ED in less than professional garb. Unfortunately, in our haste to pack I hadn't thought ahead to what I might wear, figuring wherever we were it would be hot and shorts and tees would be appropriate, that, or rubber waders (which we'd also packed.) I did have my ID badge so that, at least, they knew my name.

PART THREE

The guys, whom I had met about 1400 when they all seemed to gather together to plan out the coming week's renovated schedule, were a young bunch, mostly 30's and early 40's, all with children and wives, none with any home to go home to. One had a loaned RV, from his father-in-law, and was considered to be quite a target as all the nurses circled around him, hoping to be invited to use his shower with a freshly filled water tank that actually contianed usable water! He said he'd been elevated from refugee to trailer park trash.

Another doctor, who labelled himself 'the night shift king,' and lived in New Orleans had only been able to see his house via satellite as it was still underwater near the Garden District. His family had to evacuate to Mississippi and he had been on the last four nights and was trying, desperately, to arrange a ride to Kiln, on the road to Picayune, before his three-year-old (whom he'd not seen in that time) went farther north to her grandparents on Monday evening. He had neither car nor gas, but, being an Emergency Medicine Doctor was entitled to a gas ration card which FEMA was dealing out to those involved in rescue/medical/shelter work. (This explained the cordoned off gas pumps we saw from Meridian south which were labelled 'For use of Authroized Emergency Management Vehicles Only.') We worked a moderately busy Sunday night shift together, with the background his attempts to arrange a ride. It involved working around the curfew (which he was entitled to ignore, but Cam could not), the gas situation, and Cam's exhaustion. We finally sent him to bed at 0300 for a nap so that he could be fresh to drive at 0700 when Dr. J got off. Later, one of the FEMA personnel loaned him his personal vehicle and we allowed Cam to sleep undisturbed.

Meanwhile, back in the ED, we were busy keeping clean as best we could amongst the mayhem and jury-rigging, using only hand-gels. The makeshift AC worked until the switch was flipped reconnecting the hospital with Mississippi Power, shortly afterwards a huge blue arc was seen in the distance along I-10 and, once again, we were dark for 10 seconds or so. Then the hospital generators did their job, but no CT, no regular Xray (only portable films -- not as powerful), the chemistry machines in Lab (complex and finicky devies) went down, and, the AC was off, again. The ED crew shrugged philosophically, they were used to it.

We treated every diarrhea patient who might have drunk the water, as if he/she had cholera or salmonella. We treated every cellulitis (skin infection) as if it might be infected from seawater with v. vulnificans. Unfortunately, we weren't able to treat the elderly and debilitated as they needed. Many of the truly elderly, greater than 85 years old, simply needed a break from the overwhelming humidity and heat. They didn't have the metabolism to deal with >90 degrees F or >90% humidity, but we didn't have the beds, the AC or the nursing to deal with them. It truly was triage medicine, and on one of the ED doctors told me a stark story of having to decide, in the midst of the immediate aftermath, to black-tag a living person.

'Black-tag' means to label someone as 'unsalvageable.' It means they get 'comfort care,' i.e. pain meds, oxygen, hand-holding, but that they are not salvageable under current conditons. He had an elderly man who came in in Monday night, after the storm had ravished them, with upper gastrointestinal bleeding. He was vomitng up great gouts of blood and would have taken up their entire available supply of blood. Ordinarily they would have put out a call for more blood from surrounding hospitals, but the roads were blocked, lines were down, phones were down, they were on generator power, and the means to save him would have sapped their hospital of effectiveness to treat other patients who might be more saveable. This a terrible decision to have to make when you are used to the American way of health care -- everything for everybody-- but is not unfamiliar to those on a battlefield or those in third world countries. It makes us in health care very uncomfortable, to judge someone living as worth saving or not, but he had to make that decision. He'll remember this his whole life.

Definition of a 'Whore'

2005-08-17T03:31:00.000-04:00

A woman who no longer sleeps with you.

Story on Bondage.com

2005-08-16T12:13:00.000-04:00

I have a story published on Bondage.com. Unless you have an account, you, probably won't be able to read it, though a visitor might. It is listed under the button "words" then under "stories" and is called "Punishment." It was published on the 12th of August and they usually keep these things for years.

Locum Tenens

2005-08-10T18:15:00.000-04:00

"Locum Tenens" means "holding a place" in Latin and is commonly used in the medical professions to refer to a doctor who fills in for another physician while he/she is away on vacation or ill, or, sometimes, not even there. I.e. if a position is left vacant and can't be filled with a permanent physician someone may choose to work a few weeks there at a time. This is very similar to 'temping.'

I have just returned form ten days in S.D. on an IHS hospital site. (There are several, so I'll leave it at that as I'm fairly sure the federal government doesn't want to be associated with this blog. There are several clinics and hospitals on the 'rez.') It was an eye-opening experience and just what I wanted, a chance to stretch my skills, see another way of livng and another part of the country. Though born in Iowa and loving the priaires, I'd never looked at them quite like this.

They stressed me sometime, babies threatening to pop out before I got them to the labor and delivery suite, not cardiologist for three hours by ground, no orthopedist (except me!), a general surgeon only available M-F from 0800 to 1700, but they did have a lot of things -- nurse-midwives, and OB doc, lots of family practice people, a CT scanner (that worked about half the time...) and some really outstanding nurses in the ED. lots of very good people, too. And the patients REALLY were more stoic than the screamers we seem to have in N. Georgia.

The Chattanooga Fetish Scene and Loca Luna parties

2005-07-23T12:13:00.000-04:00

Okay, I want to make a statement about the fetish community here. People, it's large, but it ain't that large. Complaints pop up that the Loca Luna parties are BDSM lite. Yes, they are. We don't have permanent private space (yet) and must cooperate with the hotel owners or bar owners to even have avenue. Someday, SOMEDAY, maybe we can have those exclusively leather events we all dream of, but, while Chattanooga has many alternative lifestylers in it and surrounding areas, this isn't New York City. We have to be inclusive, and yes, that means that the swingers, and crossdressers and non-BDSM people in general who just may be curious, are invited. And that means we can't all be quite as open as we'd like.

But I like to view it as cross-fertilization in a public place. The vanilla people can bring their curiosity to us and we can show them it's not quite as scary as they think, that it's actually, fun! We get to meet our transsexual or gay neighbors, the goth kids, and yes, the swingers. Cruising doesn't mean dangerous, we just gots to let them know the rules. One way to teach them is to show them!

So, lighten up, Frances, and come out and enjoy the party, not as a full-on, hard-core scene, but as a cocktail party where you can enjoy the eye-candy and might actually meet (surprise) someone that you didn't know was kinky, and who didn't know you were kinky, and, hey, wanna meet up later?

Loca Luna and the Jungle Party

2005-07-14T00:23:00.000-04:00

Come 24th of July (2005) they are having a public party and fetish scene and birthday party all in one! Loca Luna, the exotic clothing store, is organizing it in conjunction with Buck Wild's Bar on Market Street in Chattanooga, TN. I am busy sewing rabbit skins dyed to look like leopard into a skirt to wear with my black corset. Yay! Check out the site www.localuna.net

Also wanted to list my favorite fetish author's blog: http://lantoniou.blogspot.com/ It's not that I agree with all her politics, though I do a good deal, but I highly recommend her books as good for the BDSMer's soul.

Don' tell HIM

2005-07-02T00:31:00.000-04:00

I 'forgot' to mention the copperhead I found under my hot tub cover Friday morning. I flipped it up to get some post-work reading time in and found a young -- about eighteen inch -- snake parked by the controls, in a crevice between them and the tub edge. My hot tub sits out on a cliff edge overlooking the valley and the secondary ridge twenty feet below me is rife with snakes sunning themselves (Hell, the snake-handling sect originated just north of Chattanooga on Sale Creek and continues to this day on this very mountain.) I don't mind them so long as they stay below me.

On average I see one snake a year (although one year a litter hatched in my side yard and I had baby copperheads pop up three times in a month!) I've only ever felt endangered by one -- a three foot rattler parked under a hedge near my sidewalk who was as thick around as my foream.

Mostly I take a live and let live attitude, but this was too close for comfort. I debated telling my man, but knew he'd come out with some gun (He's from Ohio and is afraid of snakes) and blow away both the snake and part of my deck. The snake meanwhile eyed me as I eyed it, debating whether to kill it or do my usual -- scoop it up with a shovel or pole and toss it over the cliff. I figure this way I give them a fighting chance -- if they can fly and land safely, then they're entitled to continue living, otherwise, well, it's in God's hands. But I didn't want to leave him to get a shovel, afraid he'd hide somewhere I couldn't find, so I wouldn't be able to enjoy my soak. I finally leaned down and picked up a metal pole (used for hanging torches) and planned to pick him up with it. As soon as I touched him, he coiled to strike, and I flipped him which got him to moving and he dropped off the deck edge and hurried under the leaves. About that time I heard my neighbor's dogs barking and summoned them over to me and they sniffed around interestedly, but, apparently, he had departed.

Damn it, now I'll have to walk down there a with a shovel and a dog for a while.

More on NaNoWriMo

2005-07-01T20:33:00.000-04:00

I've actually been keeping to my schedule of 500 words per day. It's been fun so far as I let my character guide me as to what comes next (that and the latest news stories about on-line predators using the chat rooms to find their victims.) I am refusing to do any research other than what I hear or already (think) I know, just letting my imagination fill in the gaps for now, knowing that, in the future, if I end up with something that I truly like (when I get to that magical 50,000 words or so) I can do the research then. But, I am turning off my left brain editor that requires me to constantly stop and ponder, then ties my feet up so that I can't proceed because "I haven't resolved a conflict...." I will write my story the way it wishes to be written and worry about the facts later. So far, seems to be working. No hitches. (And I refuse to sit down and try to parse out a plot at this point, let my mind wander ahead to possibilities, but refuse to put anything rigidly in a timeframe on paper.) I'll let my story tell itself.

I'm gonna get paid

2005-06-30T09:43:00.000-04:00

Hey, I'm going to get paid $150 for my story in the USHGAmagazine! This is more exciting than just getting published. My first professional job! you can read the unexpurgated version in the second Dec. post.

NaNoWriMo early

2005-06-28T09:43:00.000-04:00

Decided to get a head start on the NanoWriMo early and started last pm. Thought I'd give myself a running start as that means I don't have to write 1500 words per day, only about 500 to 1000. Of course, if I finish the rough draft before I get to the end of the time, I may start another. I have so many incompleter novels since I can think of a title and an opening scene, and, sometimes even the ending. It's connecting the two that kills me. I have a great little novella, novelette that I finished in the mid-90's (finally) but it's about 80n pages, and ther, therefore, too long or two short for anything commercial. No one (at least not me) reads a short story that is that long (not in one sitting) and anyone who picks up a novel wants a little longer peice for the prices they chanrge for even paperbacks these days. It's left in limbo, though I quite love it. Maybe I should post it here for critiquing. Anybody out there want to post an opinion?

How to Ruin a Bahamas Sailing Trip

2005-06-27T18:09:00.000-04:00

Take a 6th (unexpected and strange) person along. Make sure she is a snake. Then mix in thoro in a 42 foot sailboat with five others, no AC, temps above 90 with 100% humidity, one minimally functional head, no shower except a rinse off once a day in the back deck, ice gone by the fifth day, place them in isolated islands with no shade (and no way to find any other than in the depths.) Stir. P.S. Make certain that there is no place for the introverted (me) to escape from the snake (hereafter referred to as B to avoid a libel suit.)

The one place I had to disappear (and get away from her incessant insinuations, was in the water, snorkelling. Loved it and took every opportunity, but being fair-skinned and completely sunburned by the third day (despite repeated applications of 30+ Sunblock throughout the day) I had, frequently, to hide in the interior of the boat to escape further sun exposure. No, I didn't bite this woman in the butt; she is a long-time friend of the captain's (but even she got tired of B by the end) who I didn't want to offend (J being a long-time friend) by being ungenial. By the end of the trip, however, I was tense, tired, irritable and feeling like it was my fault for not being able to get in the "fun" spirit that B kept pretending to jolly me into, all the while slicing me.

I actually blamed myself for my moodiness, but, on the way home, a discussion with the 4th female member of the party (and my neighbor) revealed she had figured this woman out early. I'm just so socially dense that I figure everything that happens in a social situation is due to my inadequacies. It's taken me to 46 to realize that I'm actually an okay person. Not perfect, but not evil. This woman needed to be nipped inthe bud, but I didn't recognize how many of my chains she was yanking until I was on the (multiply) delayed flights home. Eighteen hours to get from Staniel Cay back home, a good eight of them spent in Cincinnati airport.

Bahamas Sailing

2005-06-15T11:08:00.000-04:00

Will be gone on a short (8 day vacation) to the Bahamas with friends (who are not kinky) on the sailboat one of them manages for a man in FL. She is a certified boat and charter captain and I've been with her before. Pretty particular, but we do manage to have a good time. The other couple is composed of a nurse (also very bossy) and an engineer (not bossy at all), all hangglider pilots, myself and my love. He's never been on a cruisnig boat, never been on a sailboat, never been to the Carribeans. I'll think he'll be astounded by the blues down there. I expect lively political arguments on board ship as well since Jude, the captain, is an opinionated liberal and he is an equallly loud conservative. Let the fireworks begin! The only problem is that can't throttle each other (if it comer to that) I need him to run the store and her to get us home. I shall, whatever my personal leaning, remain neutral (she practices biting her tongue, tightly.)

Blahhh

2005-06-11T07:25:00.000-04:00

One of those mornings you wake up and wonder WHY you're getting up. Third day on at work, third day of intermittent (now terminally drizzling) rain, third day of low back pain, body aches, sinus headache (all from the damned storm front). All you really want is to stay home, stare at the drizzle from the safety of the covered porch, book in your lap, cat curled around you feet (after sleeping in) and dose in the hammock. Alternatively, sleeping in next to a snuggly man appeals, being in a cold, windowless, loud environment, does not.

Novel writing -- the national challenge

2005-06-10T08:45:00.000-04:00

As the sucessful author of, at least, 6 half-novels (none, alas, completed, some in progress since college) this site appealed to me, as well as the challenge. I think, if I made a job of it and just started writing for specified times, after winnowing it down 90% (adjectives, endless modifiers -- see! -- are my weakness) I might have something worth keeping (or sending out.) Anyway, for those of you who, like me, have reams of besmirched paper hidden away in filing cabinets -- check out the site and the challenge: http://www.nanowrimo.org/ and then some of the results: http://nanoblogmo.blogspot.com/

Loca Luna Jungle Party

2005-06-09T10:52:00.000-04:00

Hey, all you in the Chattanooga and North Georgia area -- Loca Luna will be hosting a party on the 24th of July, place to be determined, with a Jungle theme (a little kink, a little fetish thrown in.) Find your leopard skin jackets and tiger-striped pants, and someone to party with. It will, most likely, be in a local bar, with fire play demos, floggiing, dancing, and a parade of the Loca Luna girls. New DJ (one who shows up on time) and the return of Mike the announcer. You can find out more at www.localuna.net, or check back here. P.S. It's Mr. Cam's birthday.

Porn Blocking Software

2005-06-07T17:09:00.000-04:00

Now, isn't it a little silly to have the ads for porn-blocking software at the BOTTOM of my blog? I mean, if you're trying to protect some virgin eyes, they'll have to scan through the whole (not very explicit in my mind) posting to get to that part, then It's Too Late! And, since the main referral to this site comes from a blurb on www.bondage.com I don't see how many children will find me. (On top of which, whenI try to search for myself on here, I never seem to be amongst the listings.) I feel falsely labelled since I don't think I'm terribly pornographic, just honest. The 'bad" stuff (such as it is) goes on my bondage site. Anyway, read on for those of you in need of big Brother.....

Infantilism

2005-06-04T05:46:00.000-04:00

No, it's not one of my fetishes. I'm definitely not into age-play, at least not younger than potty-trained, but after 4 nights on twelve hour shifts, I want to be a little girl and let Him be in charge and let Him drive and Him make the decisions. I will be 'good' and go to sleep in the back seat and, hopefully, get some sleep, otherwise, I have been known to have quite immature (and un-46 year old like) temper tantrums. (Sleep deprivation, or a low blood sugar are the two quickest ways to turn me into a three year old.)

And, just because I'm not 'into' age play doesn't mean I don't understand the attraction. Who wouldn't want to be a happy, pre-self conscious child again, able to run and laugh without worrying about others' opinons, unconcerned what to wear tomorrow or what to cook tonight or the appointment for the dog at the vet. Yes, He gets to call the shots today (hell, I wish he'd come pick me up right now from work. I'm verwy, verwy tired.)

Genital Piercings

2005-06-01T04:14:00.000-04:00

Never thought, in my more or less vanilla days, that I'd have any kind of piercings. It took me until I was 26 to get my ears pierced. It was another 18 years before my first genital piercing (clitoral hood.) Let me tell you, I vowed I'd never get another one of those. All those people who told me it didn't hurt as bad as they'd anticipated either were drunk or had very high expectations of pain. It hurt worse than I'd imagined, and ached for days. I've had a broken arm with pins and screws, and I'll take that again any day, for level of pain.

BUT, having said that, recently the Man has teased me with discussion of the further piercings with which he plans to decorate my genitals. I am intrigued. The masochistic show-off side of me is fascinated, and the warrior side of me wants me to be stoic, and the very small submissive part of me remembers what pleasure it brought him to take me before his piercer friend and display me for the pirecing. It was long a fantasy of mine, and the idea of further decoration makes me wet. I think, from the hints he's dropped, that I had better prepare myself mentally for the labial piercings we've been discussing this coming weekend. We are going to his old neighborhood in Columbus, and the piercer is part of the gay leather scene there. I am tantalized but frightened, less by the pain, than the fear of loss of control -- afraid I'll embarass him or myself crying out.

I'm Published

2005-05-26T05:58:00.000-04:00

Recieved my copy of The United States Hanggliding and Paragliding Magazine yesterday and I was one of the feature articles. Reading it, I realized that Hemingway was right, leave out all the adjectives! But, you can read the longer version of it here on the blog -- it's the second entry in December. I'm excited since it includes several photos and was originally writtten back in 1993 as a reminiscense. It was never really meant for publication.

Rewatching "The Cat People"

2005-05-20T02:35:00.000-04:00

I've decided to start rewatching ancient movies that once captivated me, but that I've not watched in two decades or more (which mainly eliminates many of the well-known ones out on DVD.) Started last year with "The Masque of the Red Death" a long-time favorite from the 60's (my mother was a great lover of sci-fi and horror movies, both of them available in abundance at drive-in theaters where she regularly took her horde for entertainment.)

Yesterday it was the turn of "The Cat People" which I'd bought on video in the 80's but never really watched (had seen it years ago on the usual 0100 a.m. showing to which we were subjected in the 60's in the name of late night programming.) I had thought it was a little tame compared to many of the slash and gore movies out now, but there is something eerily sweet and sad about it. The girl is both the danger and the one standing in front of it -- trying to ward it off.

The plot, for you unfortunates: A young, foreign-born girl, working as a sketch-artist meets a ship engineer accidentally at the zoo where is she is fascinated by a black panther. They hit it off and he invites her to tea 'sometime,' she invites him to tea 'now.' They sit in her dark apartment and listen to the wild cats scream in the twilight. She tells him of her ancient village in Serbia where the people, during the dark ages, had turned to devil worship and the women had the power to turn into cats, when their passions overwhelmed them.

Of course you can see the whole thing coming. He courts her and they end up, reluctantly on her part because she feels her fate approaching her, wed. She refuses to kiss him or even bed him. He is tolerant and loving, but it palls after a while and he mentions it to a gal pal at work. His wife becomes jealous of their easy-going relationship and frightening things begin to happen. Cat-like screams are heard in the shadows, the female friend's robe is torn to ribbons as she swims in a basement pool, the wife disappears at odd moments. The husband tries to get her psychiatric help, but the psychiatrist, at first skeptical, is also very attracted to the danger of the wife and, finally, attempts to seduce her, to prove to her that her superstitions are wrong. You finish it.

The story is simple, but the lighting, the stark black and white imagery, the simplicity of the tale, and the way the legend itself parallels so much of what we feel about the female sexual drive. Sometimes "simple" lets your own imagination fill in the blanks. And, for it's time, it was a very straightforward tale about sex. Not so much a horror movie as an exploration of sexual danger and the unleashing of powerful female libidoes.

Driving and Clairvoyance -- my vent

2005-05-20T02:27:00.000-04:00

Yeah, they don't actually occur together often in nature, which is one of my pet peeves. If I Knew what you were going to do ahead of time, all those turn signal, brake light, etc. thingies would be optional equipment. I would know that the little sign off to your right with "free beer" on it has just gotten your attention and that you're about to cross two lanes of traffic to intercept it. But, I'm not, and that's why you need to use the damned turn signal. It's actually a law. It's also just plain smart to signal the rest of the herd when you suddenly decide to veer, unless you are in a tank. (Breathe deep!) Okay, I'm done now.

Hanging On Gliding

2005-05-05T18:32:00.000-04:00

Cool, I've got a link to Red Bull on the bottom of my blog! I love that stuff for it's kick-ass attitude and the fact that, of all the energy drinks, it's the least sweet and really does give me a little boost. My brother, the bull-rider, swears by it for the long hauls between rodeos, and I use it for distance driving and as a late night pick me up in the ED.

But, I really started out to talk about ' hanging on gliding,' when you are just glad to still have the basetube in your hands. It was blowing 15-20 all day, with gusts to 25-30, and I knew it was strong, but I have been so air-horny that it was like being a fresh HangvIII all over again. I waited around all day (instead of doing something useful like housework) and left the Man to lawncare, set up at 5pm anticipating the usual evening glass-off. It never materialized, at least not until after official sunset, when all good hanggliders, who don't want the FAA breathing down their necks, must be safely stowed on the ground. So, at 1715 I decided that I had flown in this shit before and I oculd handle it.

Yes, I had, and, yes, I could, but I couldn't make myself look graceful and I lured very few other pilots off the ramp after the rock 'n roll ride I had a few seconds after launch. Had a great 1 and 1/2 hour flight, but the gusts persisted and the thermals (still there when I came down to land at 1845) were over 800fpm up right off launch. Youch, got to test whether my shoulders are still up to that kind of stress.
P.S. The photo above is, actually, me in Austria.

Divorce Explanations

2005-05-01T05:19:00.000-04:00

1) It was all my fault for being unfaithful. I'm a slut. (his)
2) It was his fault for deserting me after he had promised to help me raise my nephew. (not really my explanation, but it starts out this way some days. I try not to use this in front of people; it's too self-serving.)
3) We were tearing each other apart and two good people don't need to do that. (for public consumption)
4) He was destroying me by making me choose between me and 'the kid' as he labelled my nephew. But he knew about my commitment to family and that I had promised R a place to stay as long as he attended school, didn't break any major rules, and passed his classes. He didn't realize that when he said, "him or me," It meant him or my promises, my integrity, my vision of myself. (this is the one I claim most often in my silent arguments with him.)
5) We both got bored. (probably some truth here.)
6) Neither of us was good at discussing or even recognizing and naming our feelings, let alone discussing how two such misfits and independent people ever found anyone to marry them -- a couple of lone eagles better in a thermal than in a nest. (Getting closer to the heart of the problem)
7) Neither of us was willing to give up ourselves or self-image, even for the love of each other. And we did love each other. (Truth)
8) Selfishness. (oh, yes.)

Air-horny

2005-04-29T09:00:00.000-04:00

I am air-horny. That 9 days in FL has made me hungry for more. Trouble is, the weather's just not cooperating. We're still in the throws of the vernal equinox which means the winds are too strong or (like yesterday) rotating through so rapidly that after a storm front, that the wind direction (crucial in mountain launch area, not so important in the flatlands) switches from SW to NE in a matter of half a day.
It is enchantingly green up here (we are still mid-spring in this part of GA, being on the mountain), from the bright spring greens of my oaks, to the deeper greens of my pines (those that have survived the pine-beetle thus far.) I feel enveloped in the color which I find soothing, but I want, oh-so-much, to be soaring over it, hanging above it. Being air horny is like just being horny -- you feel slightly on edge and wanting, wanting, something, to happen. But hang-waiting is a skill (I keep reminding myself, though self thinks this is nonsense) that I had to develope as a mountian pilot long ago. Provided I keep on living, there will be other days. It's just I want it now!

Flying in Florida

2005-04-26T11:36:00.000-04:00

Somehow, flying and BDSM don't mix in my head. One is in the sun and fresh air and, while physical, and sometimes sexual, it is more of a solitary sport, unless you just love chit-chat on the radio. (I don't.)
The comps last week were held in near-perfect weather. Except for the first two days when the winds were too strong, we had 6 days of valid flying. Saturday, the 23rd, we were closed down by rain and the death of a competitor. Chris Muller, a young Canadian aerobatics pilot was going for an object on the ground at finish (a 'goodies' bag put here as a challenge to those pilots who cared to skim that low) and dove right into the dirt at 60 mph. Made it to the hospital by helicopter, but didn't survive.
To someone outside the sport, it might seem stupid. It was, but, my feeling is we all make choices. Chris was an aerobatics pilot, loved taking those risks. I don't agree with his choices, but people think I'm crazy just flying hanggliders (never mind that I consider myself a conservative pilot.) So, I can't condemn him, just hate the waste of talent and a lifetime of flying. He made a mistake which cost him everything worthwhile in this world. But, his choices were what shaped his personality. If he didn't make those choices he wouldn't have been Chris Muller. I don't think that is a circular argument. I am more frightened of driving I-75 going into ATL at dusk, than I am of hanggliding. I've been sidewiped by a semi before, but I've never had anyone hit me in the air. We all take calculated risks, and we'd better be aware of the costs when we lose our gamble. Most people don't expect to die driving to the grocery store, but I'm always very aware of the chance of really hurting myself when I fly.
Aside from that, which didn't happen until the last day of the meet, I had some great flying days. Drove to Wallaby Ranch each day since Quest was so busy (0ver 100 pilots competing). Malcolm and staff did a wonderful job making me feel comfortable back on tow. The first day I went up tandem with Malcolm to see if I stil recalled my skills. He basically let me fly it from start to finish, then told me to stop wasting his time and go tow. Did three more that morning on their loaner Falcon, had great tows, watched hot-air balloons come into his field and land, then packed it up since my arms were tired. Next day I was back under tow on my own 142XC and had three good ones, saving the fourth tow until the afternoon so that I cold judge how i was doing in thermally air. Got up and soared for 35 minutes, felt happy with that and packed up for home ( Questairforce.com )
I stopped on the way when I noticed a cross-country pilot thermalling low about 6 miles from Wallaby. It was a bit out of the way for the comp pilots unless one of them had gotten lost, so I pulled over to watch. S/he didn't seem to be making much up, and, eventually, he landed by some cows. I waved and he came over to the gate where he took down his glider and we packed it on the truck before transporting him back to Wallaby. Turned out to be a visiting pilot from CO, in for a conference who had stolen off from Orlando for a day. We flew together the next day, too, after I had another midday flight that only lasted 40 min (the clouds cut off the thermals about 2p.) Craig and I, after lunch and a breather, towed back up at 1630 and managed to punch through the inversion layer (4500MSL) to 5600MSL for a lovely late afternoon flight with dozens of other pilots up toodling about.
Coming in on the last flight, the sunlight was golden through the inversion layer, scattered, and the thermals were light, the 100fpm stuff I prefer over the midday of >800fpm, the kind where you don't even hold onto the bar, just rest your foreams on the control frame and lazily loop in lift, watching all around you bathed in gold. Below me, over a swamp, a flock of ibises took off, something from an African movie, white against the dark green, far below me. Peaceful, and feeling like dessert to me.
Today it's raining in Georgia and I have to work tomorrow, but it might mellow in the evening Wednesday, and Thursday is looking good (I happen to be off then.) Flying is back on my agenda.
The results of the nationals and the pictures by the meet organizer can be seen at: http://www.flytec.com/flytec_usn_05/scores.html

Wallaby Ranch and Flying

2005-04-07T15:19:00.000-04:00

Off to Wallaby Ranch, near Orlando, next Friday, for towing and flying and camping out and partying. There's a national competition being held at QuestAir, about 30 minutes from Wallaby (both towing hanggliding sites) and I'm going to drive for a friend who's competing for a spot on the Women's World Team. I don't want to compete, just refresh my towing skills and plan for nothing more than enjoying the sport in the sun. Anymore, life gets in the way of my hanggliding. www.wallaby.com

Pre-Fantasm Soaring

2005-03-17T13:18:00.000-04:00

I soared on Monday, the 14th, for the first time in almost two years. I didn't realize this until I was 2300 feet over launch when I looked down at the winter-seared valley and plateau, all grays and browns with just touches of green. Hadn't seen my mountain from this angle since the spring of 2003, just before that last flying trip to the Alps of Austria with my ex-husband and flying buddies. It was a great trip from a hanggliding viewpoint -- endless days of thermals until we were almost begging God for a day off just to rest our arms -- but finished off my marriage. (It was after this trip that I searched out bondage.com and posted my profile.)

Monday was a day of 40-50 degrees and slightly gusty winds, typical of this area in the spring when the rock faces make for strong, punchy, "mean" little thermals. But I hadn't lost my skills and thermalled over several "topless" gliders before forcing myself to land after 1 hours 35 minutes simply because I knew my arms wouldn't be of any use on landing if I didn't land then. As a matter of fact, I had tried to land twice before, but the valley lifted off at 5 pm and I couldn't get down. Finally, I had to "core sink." (I.e. I had to find a spot without so much lift and slip my turns to intentionally lose altitude.) I was right about the arms and flopped in on landing (partially due to rotor over the north foothills) bruising my left ribs, just in time to wear a corset all weekend at Fantasm.

Speaking of Fantasm, hope to meet ya'll there, we're leaving in less than two hours! Yay!

Gardening and BDSM

2005-03-09T22:57:00.000-04:00

What do they have in common? Not much you say (and I agree.) Just wanted to talk about both and it seemed an eye-grabber.

Am looking forward to Fantasm in Atlanta next week and have been busy making plans and sewing a new gown to wear with my purple vinyl corset (my favorite). I used to sew costumes for theatre, though my skills are rusty. Since becoming more openly fetishy, I've started trying to create the very clothes in which I most want to see myself, and they're not all in the Stormy Leather catalog. Some of the personas in my head are more male than female or ambiguous. My love is fine with his boy-girl, calls me "Orlando Bloom with tits," and teases me about "forced feminization of a female."

The garden is budding and the daffodils aren't deterred by our weather forecasts (it was snowing on the mountain as I drove to work this evening.) I go out every afternoon to pick up the mail and check to see the need sprouts on my pruned roses and fruit trees and impatiently await the passing of this string of fronts to plant my strawberries and my grown-from-seed tomatoes. My herbs are also sprouting and I've got a slew (or is that slough) of evergreens to plant to act as a screen from the disapproving eyes of my ex-husband. Two in the ground and ten more to go -- hope they grow as quickly as advertised. ;)

Fantasm in Atlanta

2005-02-27T16:32:00.000-04:00

All you perverts need to migrate to Atlanta the weekend of 17th of March. The last OFFICIAL Fantasm (a sexually oriented sci-fi convention -- bring no children!) ist be held that weekend. It is a four day event of unbridled fetishism and fun. The room parties last year were eye-popping ("oral sex room") and wehope to send off the name with a flourish. They have classes on BDSM techniques (needle zippers, anyone?) and a playroom with suspended rope bondage (yes!)

Other than a participant, I am in no way connected with this endeavor financially, but when you have people chocolate pudding wrestling in the open airway and pony-girls prancing through the lobby while Wiccans gather at a fountain nearby to sanctify the place, and then the drumming group starts up and the Celts in kilts gather to stomp, you know it's gonna be a fun night!

Find more at www.Fantasm.org

Influenza and the Emergency Department

2005-02-19T05:28:00.000-04:00

Warning, highly individual opinion to follow (typed in at 0400 in the morning after three weeks of this!)

DON'T GO TO THE ER!

Okay, maybe I'm just joking, but only a little. Unless you are truly dying (and not just thinking you are) do not go to the ED (Emergency Department.) Number one, we can't get to you; number two, if you don't have the flu, you will after sitting there for hours waiting to be seen, surrounded by sufferers of the flu. Even face masks provide scant protection in the crowded waiting room.

In the area where I work (seven hospitals around here) most of the ED's are in gridlock. We can't move patients to the floors because they are full or have reduced staffing due to the nationwide nursing shortage; since we can't free up the beds in the ED, we are reduced to seeing a handful of patients at a time on the hall stretchers, in between the usual number of codes (dying or dead people) and car accidents and nursing home transfers, etc. This overloads the already overworked nurses (no, I'm not a nurse) who are dealing with inpatients that shouldn't be there, as well as the acutely ill. I know you feel like a walking corpse -- I've had influenza before myself -- but, unless you have some serious complication or underlying condition, you'll survive. Save yourself hours (around here 8-10 hour waits are routine these last few weeks) of misery and exposure to other contagions and stay home.

Call your boss, tell him the situation. Sending employees to the ED regularly to get work excuses during a flu season is cruel, unnecessary, and expensive (adding to the company cost of healthcare, remind her.) Going to work sick is not loyal, it's stupid. You'll make everyone else ill and the company will lose still more work time. Stay home, drink those fluids, dose yourself with ibuprofen or acetaminophen (if the fever returns before it's time for more acetaminophen, alternate between the two -- ibuprofen's better for the achiness anyway), get some soup into you, wash your hands religiously, and avoid contaminating the other members of your family or tribe. Nyquil really does help (just remember it has acetaminophen in it.) If you have a family doctor, they may be able to call something in for you.

If you develope more serious symtoms -- a cough with yellow or green phlegm production, chest pain, severe shortness of breath, or vomiting and unable to keep down fluids, certainly you may need to brave the crowds. But, bring a novel.

Snowboarding West Virginia

2005-02-04T02:44:00.000-04:00

Just back from a snowboarding trip (finally -- was afraid I'd lose the knack) at Snowshoe Mtn, WV. There had just been a big blizzard when we arrived on Sunday the 23 January with wind blowing forty and the temperature about 0 F. It stayed cold the next day, too cold for two exhausted and middle-aged people who hadn't rested well the night before. It wasn't the accomodations (Highland House was great) but rather a combination of my coming off night shifts, the long drive, the bone-aching cold (hey, even kinky people get arthitis) and the fact that the snow plows started moving the accumulated snow about, oh, 0400! We were in one of the primo lodges and couldn't sleep late on any of our vacation due to the overzealous snowplowing.

But, we had a great time on the second day when we actually got out in that snow -- light and fluffy and powdery and soft. He took off on the skis like he'd been skiing all his life instead of last seeing slopes (if they can be called that in OH) back in the early 80's. I was stiff and scared for the first 60 minutes back on the board, then finally stopped trying to "think" my way down the hill and just started letting myself feel it -- letting go. This loss of control has always been my key to enjoying any physical experience. First I fight it, trying to intellectualize the experience, sort it, catalog it, monitor it, but to truly enjoy hanggliding, surfing, skiing, snowboarding, sex, I have had to learn to let go and just ride the sensation. Turn off my left brain.

Letting go is more difficult than many "natural" athletes realize. Those of us engineering types spend all of our life in our left brains, naming and identifying and cataloging, but only rarely allowing the non-verbal side of our brains to take over and just feel. We keep tripping up our feet by thinking too much about the dance steps.

So, after floundering about and getting frustrated with my physical self, I decided to turn off the brain. Worked wonderfully and my lover was even impressed with my grace on the board. As he pointed out, most of the really flying boarders were half my age and male, with a handful of female boarders mixed in (mind you we were only on the green and blue slopes) but none of them were anywhere near my age. It made me feel less judgemental of myself to hear that and to relax and just laugh the few times I plowed down a slope. Laughing reminds me that this is all just a game and the only one I'm really competing with is myself. No one lives or dies (except maybe me) based on my ability or inability to board with the big boys. It's purely recreation, a change from my usual job.

Loca Luna

2005-01-14T07:20:00.000-04:00

My lover's exotic clothing store in Chattanooga was voted the second best place (behind Victoria's Secret) to go if you are "in the doghouse and need to buy gift." I'd say, considering the disparity in ad budgets, that that's pretty wonderful after only 9 months in business. www.localuna.net

Hanggliding competition news

2005-01-13T11:15:00.000-04:00

Best site I've found for it is http://www.ozreport.com It usually keeps up with all the major comps and is reporting, right now, on the Worlds. I'm hoping, personally, to make it to Quest in April for those preliminaries, not as a competition pilot, but as a volunteer.

Only comp hanggliding I've ever done was local in the 90's, though I did set a personal best cross-country flight of 46 miles over in Sequatchie Valley during one of those (out and back). Flying back and forth along the ridge to the point of Lookout Mountain, while a glorious view, doesn't feel like nearly such an accomplishment (though it is about 22 miles total.) It's awesome to see the mountain fall away from you as you mount the thermal (or ridge lift) that is invariably there at the confluence of three valleys, Chattanooga spreading out below you, the tourists unaware that you are soaring overhead, unless some dog barks at you or a more curious than usual child looks up.

Simplicity

2005-01-12T12:30:00.000-04:00

I get teased a lot by my love that I have a "Little House on the Prairie" attitude -- "We didn't have it when I was growing up, and we don't need it now." (Specifically, he's referring to the fact that I lack a dishwasher at age 45, though I could well afford one, and cable TV.) But, the truth is that I like simplicity and every gadget you add is another gadget to maintain and service. As an old boyfriend (into Zen) once told me, "Ownership of cow means care of cow."
Other than hiding the dirty dishes or storing the freshly cleaned ones, I can't see the advantage in a small household (two people, four animals) of having a machine to do my dishes. I can very well wash all our dishes in 20 minutes every other day. (Yes, she hangs her head in shame, every OTHER day.) I loathe paying the price for cable or satellite television since most of what is on is not worth watching anyway, let alone paying the cost of a decent bottle of wine monthly, and I don't have more than an hour or so a day to waste on it anyway. Likewise, I have yet to purchase an I-Pod, though I am not anti-technology. It's merely that I have so many other music-playing devices in my life and I'm not that intensely needy of a soundtrack to my life.
I think differentiating between what one desires and what one needs is vital. Once you have decided that you want something (rather than need it) you have to decide what price you are willing to pay for it -- not just in money, but in maintainance or space or clutter or aggravation when it breaks. Thus, I have not been willing to pay the price in space for a waffle iron or mutltiple other small, subspecialized equipment for the kitchen. Nor, for a dishwasher.

When did you know you HAD to fly?

2005-01-12T10:12:00.000-04:00

Hanggliding, for me, was an "aha" moment. I had never seen it, but when I first read of it in the early 1970's, it was as if I had been waiting for my wings to appear. I flew in my dreams all the time and used to leap from the top of our house with sheets, umbrellas, my faith alone. The bruises didn't matter (somehow I managed to avoid broken bones or brain damage) but I knew I would have to get into the air. Somehow.

Hanggliding was as if the gods had read my mind -- my own wings, no motor, silent, soaring with the birds. I loved the idea of hanging over the landscape, observing, isolated, contemplative. The lack of motor appealed even more since I loathe unnecessary noise and complications. No motor to maintain meant I was in charge of my dream even more -- no other humans need be involved. And the simplicity of the wing -- the apparent simplicity(nothing more than dacron, wires, and aluminum tubing) -- made the sport perfect in my eyes. Less equipment equalled less aggravation -- fewer things to break.

(Actually, I have found that hanggliding is a solitary sport in the air -- or can be if you resist the need to discuss every turn with your buddies over the radio -- and a group sport on the ground. You need help with windy cliff launches, hangchecks, and wind dummies.)

Flying with Hawks

2005-01-11T12:26:00.000-04:00

I have flown with a hawk, wingtip to wingtip, and she stared back at me, repeatedly twisting her head to see what it was flying beside and whether I intended to attack. We were a mile over Lookout Valley on a clear cold morning and strong enough that I had the air to myself. We sat over the Cloudland Canyon gap and turned in the strong thermal, each circuit carrying us about to face northwest, the wind direction. I was too cold, but I couldn't leave that much joy. I'm sure I was chuckling, I wanted to laugh in triumph, but didn't want to frighten my flying partner. It was my first time, but it hasn't been my last.

Flew Yesterday despite...

2005-01-10T17:05:00.000-04:00

Despite it not being a flyable day (i.e. very few getting up); flew despite my venoumous ex leanig over from the deck glaring at me (he works at the flight park); flew and landed well despite my ex parking himself prominently in the LZ. Thought I saw his truck as I flew past the flagpole checking out the wind direction, but too busy on my approach to dwell on it. Had a no-step landing within a hundred feet of the cone (not bad with only four landings under my belt in the last 15 months.) Realized after touching down that he and his buddy were both waiting down there, leaned against the pole. They drove off after I disappointed them. Felt good; felt right.

Christianity and BDSM

2005-01-01T21:26:00.000-04:00

I grew up Southern Baptist in the late 60's which means that I heard about sex more by the lack of coherent comment than by explicit warnings to avoid it. By the time I came of age the sexual revolution was in full-swing -- post Stonewall and the original Women's Lib marches, long after the pill, adecade before AIDS terrorized us into being "good" and "celibate" like Mr. Falwell.
Sex was "bad" in general (except inside of marriage) but they never really specifically said which type -- man on top, anal, oral, fetishy. I assumed that that meant that what happened between the duly married was their business, and, having read the Bible through more than once (okay, maybe I skiped Job the second time and some minor prophets) I found nowhere (except in reference to a woman's "unclean time" in Leviticus -- the same book that talks about eating of clean and unclean animals and forbids spilling your seed on the ground and male to male intercourse) when specific sex acts were excluded. Therefore, except for the fact that I am currently unwed, I don't think that God cares if the woman is on top in a corset and nipple clamps with a reddened ass or if the man's scrotum is pierced multiply. And if they make each other feel good in their souls' houses then they are a little closer to heaven.

When did you know you were 'kinky?'

2004-12-24T11:01:00.000-04:00

Most of the people I know (and with whom I have been friends long enough to discuss sex) tell me that they knew early what their proclivities were. I.e., my friend Chuck, growing up in 1960's Mississippi, realized that he was attracted to boys, rather than girls, at age 7, and also realized, that he had to keep this quiet. Like Chuck, I was 6 or 7 when I remember being fascinated by a photo of a Vietnamese torture victim (can't remember which side was torturing which) trussed up like some turkey, with a pole behind his arms, being dunked head first into a barrel of water. I kept looking at the picture, not at all repelled.
After that, I remember that many of my childhood fantasies revolved around captivity or slavery or being the proud warrior under torture. Of course, I never would, inmy fantasies, "break." My first sex symbol, at 8, was Charlton Heston with the collar around his neck in "Planet of the Apes." But, also like my friend Chuck, I realized I needed to keep this quiet. Other girls went into 'oohs' and 'aahs' over this young star or that 'cute' boy. I preferred (really) Jack Palance as Dracula in the 1970's mini-series and Curt Russell in skin-tight buckskins on some obscure TV series also from that era. I used to sneak my father's hidden "Falconhurst" and "Mandingo" novels about slaves and sex and torture in the antebellum south, secretly revelling in the whipping scenes. "Branded," the 1960's western about a marked former soldier excited me. But, knowing I was 'warped' or 'kinky' I kept it to myself. I considered myself rare and odd, not realizing that somewhere around 7% of the poplulation is also bent in that direction. I didn't know how to seek out the kind of sex that I conjured in my daydreams. All I could imagine, growing up in pre-liberated Mississippi, was that I'd end up with a gorilla boyfriend or as a rape victim if I did indulge myself.
And then, being very much a feminist, I had no wish to "submit" to some man except in a sexual sense. A submissive relationship outside of the bed would have been a betrayal of all my feelings that the sexes are two halves of humanity. It was a delimna.
I satisfied my itch (occassionally) by cajoling my boyfriends into "wild" sex or the (rarer still) one-night stands. In the late eighties, I did have a moderately kinky boyfriend and, stayed with him for 3 years strictly because I felt safe around him. Then we slipped apart and I married a very vanilla man (but one wo loved and excited me inother ways) and buried that "kinky" part of me, I thought, forever.
However, after ten years of marriage and a whole lot a other "stuff," I happened upon bondage.com one day when he had ridiculed me for reading my "dirty books." Angry and humiliated (sex had become a non-event during our break-up) I posted a profile, mainly to browse the photos and advice. The next day I was shocked to find my mailbox laden with 13 requests to meet me, though I had posted the barest minimum stick figures. Within ten days I had played out my first formal BDSM scene.

This is how it feels flying

2004-12-21T16:40:00.000-04:00

I love this image and, if I ever got a tattoo, it would be this: http://icaro2000.com

B.com

2004-12-17T02:35:00.000-04:00

Those who know what it is refer to it as b.com in public, but that's really short for bondage.com. It's a protective reflex, but protecting who from what? And why? We're adults. If we like a little spice with our sex, then why should our jokes, references to "that thing that we do" be so veiled? It's not that our neighbors want or need to know our proclivities and tastes in graphic and extensive detail, but, why is it such a secret that somewhere about 7% of the population (seems like more from all the conversations I've had this last year with friends and family) are kinky or, at least, like something besides 'vanilla' sex.
Vanilla in this sense can seem a perjorative, but refers to those acts that we think the religious right endorses. Trouble is, what is kinky? Oral sex in the sixties was considered very 'naughty,' but is now a common and 'normal' part of the sex lives of heterosexual partners. Occasional light spanking figures in many a mainstream novel or movie. In the decades since I've known I was 'twisted' what is the norm has been a moving target and those things once considered perversions (cross-dressing, transsexuality, anal sex, even -- in my childhood -- homosexuality) are openly discussed and recognized. Clothing fetishes are worn by the mainstream -- corsets and bustiers, leather pants, thigh-high boots, extremely high heels. Oprah even discussed the best vibrators on her TV show.
Those who are curious may investigate at www.bondage.com

Gingerbread

2004-12-15T04:30:00.000-04:00

Gingerbread, gingerbread, gingerbread -- I'm about to get sick of the stuff and still have about 12 dozen more to make of the 70 dozen I planned on this Christmas. I started making the stuff in Mobile, AL, before moving up here and it has become a tradition for me. It brings on the Christmas spirit and is my way of sharing myself, being that I am somewhat reclusive. It is also the gift I give you if I don't want to buy you a present.
I tell everyone that it is a family recipe, but I actually got it from the Betty Crocker cookbook my mom had when I was growing up. She made it, too, but not the way I do. I love it spicey and thick -- cakelike. Even people who don't like gingerbread seem to enjoy it. But, by the end of the baking both I and the kitchen counters and floor are well dusted with flour and I am sick of the smells of cloves, cinnamon, allspice and ginger, and the endless hand mixing that the stiff dough requires. I usually only eat one or two of my own cookies.
Outside the wind is romping, typical winter at Lookout -- too cold for those strong enough to fly, too strong for the rest of us. I've flown in that stuff -- or been flown by it, waiting to land when my hands were so cold I couldn't feel them, nor release them from the control bar. Winter here varies between windy and rainy and bright and cold and windier. Fortunately, it only lasts two months.

Gingerbread Cookies (thick ones):

1/3C shortening
1C Brown sugar -- dark
1 12-oz bottle molasses
Mix together thoroughly with:
1&1/2 tsp cinnamon, allspice, ginger, and cloves
add 2/3C cold water and mix
Add in 7C plain flour and 1 tsp salt with 2 tsp baking soda.
The dough will be quite stiff and may require hand-kneading to work the last of the flour in. Roll out thick (about 1/4-1/2 inch thick) and cut into festive shapes. Bake on lightly greased (I use Pam) cooking sheet at 350 degrees for 15 min. Makes about 3-3&1/2 dozen medium-sized cookies

2004-12-08T22:55:00.000-04:00

Drove 6 hours today to watch my youngest nephew -- also a hangglider pilot -- graduate from advanced military training in Columbia, SC.
Yesterday was a perfect fall day for Lookout -- wind from the west, 70 degrees and cumulus clouds everywhere. Trouble was that it was also howling thirty with gusts to forty (enough to shake the house -- I sit on the cliff edge.)
It was a good day to bake gingerbread and air out the house.
The long post yesterday was the mostly uncut version of an article I rewrote for the about to be renamed USHGA (United States Hanggliding Assocation) magazine. www.ushga.org

I jump from a mountain

2004-12-06T14:04:00.000-04:00

“It sounds as if you really need to go and do this hanggliding thing...,” the poet said, lounging on the Hilton sheets, his head at my feet. Watching his intense eyes flick to the bedside alarm and back, knowing that this was the first meaningful thing he’d said to me in a long weekend of evasion, knowing I would not be coming back to Miami even if he asked me again, I decided he was right. I had been needing that hanggliding thing for a long time, now worse than ever. I needed to start my life.
I had lied to my not quite significant other as to my destination that weekend, informing him that I was off to San Antonio to my sister’s, when what I really craved was a lost weekend with a guy who had written some mean poetry, including one on the Fassbinder movie, “Aguirre, the Wrath of God.” Mind you I had never seen the film, but his verbal somersaults had enticed me into sex the weekend of an old and mutual friend’s wedding and we had kept up a correspondence and limited physical relationship the ensuing two years. This would be the last weekend. The physical excitement had gone; the mental excitement withered in disparate personalities. But, I still thought he had rare insights; I was ready to fly.
When I first read an article about hanggliding in 1973, I was 14 years old and sitting in the Sturgis, Mississippi, high school library, flipping through Popular Mechanics. It opened to photos of a man floating gracefully above the landscape as I had soared silently, overhead, in dreams, only to awaken, disappointed, squarely in bed. I had leapt from our roof with a gathered sheet and old umbrellas and had even, being a Southern Baptist, tried the “faith can move mountains” trick. I never quite generated enough faith to become airborne and decided it represented my poor standing with God (a result of my heathen belief in evolution as a real option).
So, when I read that article, in my usual solitary, lunchtime browsing something in the eternal jigsaw of the universe clicked into place and I knew I would, someday, learn to fly one of those things. I started saving for a pair that summer, almost accumulating the five hundred dollars needed to buy the kit advertised in the back of the same magazine (which I filched and kept under my bed for years).
It is, perhaps, fortunate that my parents divorced about the time I had enough and that I used the money, instead, to pay for early college courses at MSU, just eighteen miles up the road. Supposing I had sent off for the kit, and supposing I had assembled it correctly, and even supposing I was able to convince my parents the thing was safe to fly, there were then and are now very few hangglider pilots in Mississippi, fewer instructors, and no mountains. I might have flown somewhere, but I might also have become the first hanggliding fatality in that state.
All through my poverty-stricken college years at Mississippi State University and the subsequent penury of medical school in Jackson (run by that other university in Mississippi) I had periodically pulled out the old article, promising myself. I had heard nothing of the sport in years and wasn’t even sure it still existed until I mentioned hanggliding to a fellow classmate named (no, really) Richard Birdsong. In the early eighties, he had gone to a hanggliding school near Chattanooga, TN, on a college adventure weekend. He knew it was on Lookout Mountain and he thought it was still extant. However, this was medical school when one is not permitted to have aspirations beyond a shower and occasional sleep.
I went into a surgical residency on a whim, but a time-consuming one. Then, in the fall of my third year of residency, my father died, on the 25th anniversary of JFK’s assassination. I thought I had been prepared, but the week after the funeral in San Antonio, I took a few days off to cry and stare at the walls, thinking of dreams lost and dreams forgone, then called the Chattanooga Tourist Bureau.
Yes, they did know of hanggliding off Lookout Mountain, but the person speaking to me didn’t have an address. Instead she gave me a number for High Adventure Mountain Sports at Raccoon Mountain. I was thinking it was a darned elusive sport. Leon answered, but all he had was a flight simulator (a hangglider on a string). I didn’t want a thrill ride; I wanted the real thing. Did he, perhaps, know anyone who gave lessons? Oh, sure, Matt Tabor, up on Lookout Mountain; did I want the number? Yes, Leon, I very much did. (I now publicly thank him, though I’ve yet to meet the man.)
I hesitated a few moments, knowing I was about to commit myself to something irrevocable. The call was answered, briskly, “Lookout Mountain Flight Park, Joanne speaking, can I help you?” Yes, you can. Do you fly in January? Sure, they taught daily and flew whenever the winds permitted. I quickly booked my boyfriend and myself for lessons. Where had I seen their ad, please? Nowhere; did they have ads? I’d only been looking for them half my life.
So, finally, and before I reached the dread age of thirty, before I was too old, whatever age that was, before I died, like my father, with few dreams fulfilled, I was going to be a hangglider pilot. It was raining in Mobile when my less than excited boyfriend and I left and it was still raining when we got to Chattanooga seven hours and several arguments later. Along the way, amidst the stiff silences, I had deciphered the words to Mike and the Mechanics “The Living Years” and it seemed appropriate theme music, seven weeks after my father’s death.
It was only cold that first Monday morning, not below freezing as it would be subsequently, and we became lost in rising mist on the way to the ridge-top shop, arriving at the appointed nine o’clock. I remember watching a video about assembling the glider and launching it -- simple. The same Joanne, less brisk, more pleasant in person, signed us up, took my credit card, and handed me a closely typed sheet listing many possible ways to mangle and or kill myself in the sport and absolving them of all responsibility for my idiocy or ineptitude. She couldn’t have scared me off, at that point, with bloody film footage, though I’m not certain Alf felt the same.
Dave, a tall geologist on sabbatical from the oil fields of Texas, was our first instructor. He took us out for ground school to the training site, among the foothills near Trenton, GA. There we ran across the winter brown fields with the gliders, learning to balance them on our shoulders. My glider lifted off, trying to fly of its own volition; I imagined it dragging me skyward. Even Alf, more enamored of powered flight, seemed happy in the brisk air, the winter sunshine pouring on us as we ran like children in a playground -- a little embarrassed to be in student mode again.
That afternoon we went to the shop to watch the “real” pilots launch, and Alf chatted with them easily, learning from them, while I, jealous, stood to the back, labeled “the girlfriend.” It was not their fault; I was self-conscious and hadn’t learned yet that the formal lessons are not the whole of a sport, that the talking afterwards, the bits one picks up chatting with the ‘pros’ and the ‘old-timers,’ the stories, tall tales, and myths of a sport or profession, are handed down this way. I watched them launch, walking down the concrete slab set at what seemed a precipitous angle over the cliff. The panorama of the valley spread below me as I huddled on the cold ledge, and these men, and sometimes women, dove over the edge that frightened me, flinging themselves into a void, trusting on wings of aluminum and thin dacron to bear them up, to catch the wind and take them to the clouds. In the brisk January winds I saw these things fly for the first time in my life, saw them lifted like an elevator over our heads in the moment they twisted free of the wirecrew, saw them taken straight up into the sky. They hovered there, dipping down to flaunt their wings at us or whoop a greeting. They were chilled but cheerful, taking their pleasure up there as if born to swim in air. I envied them and lusted for their skills. The sport was more than I had imagined. I wanted in.
I don’t remember if it was the second morning when we got our first flights from the bunny hill, but I remember the first time I was airborne, really being held up by nothing but air swirling under my wings, feeling my feet lift free of the brown-stubbled ground. It was a giddy experience, like a sudden lift at the bottom of the roller coaster, when your stomach floats up, but longer, and I chortled like some kid. It was also addictive. I progressed rapidly the first couple of days, my instructors pleased with my energy; mostly, the female students they saw were dragged there by overenthusiastic boyfriends. Alf fell into the “dragged girlfriend” category. He sprained his ankle the third day, thankfully, I think.
The weather turned viciously cold, freezing the wet ground, biting my hands and feet, turning the reminders of the cows who shared our training field into stones along my bumpy path. The cold made it difficult to warm up and loosen, but I progressed until the morning I, too, was injured. Alf's training video memorializes the exact sequence when I tried to break my neck.
There I am, a lump dressed for the arctic conditions, trudging with Greg Ball up the hill after several clumsy landings trying to avoid the frozen over cow wallow at the bottom of the hill. Finally he told me to “flare,” or stall the glider to make it stop, as if the puddle wasn’t there -- ignore it. I didn’t flare, or not hard enough, and rolled onto the ice. Unfortunately, the wheels broke through the ice and locked and my momentum flung me forward, swinging me in my harness like a bell-clapper against the keel, my neck bent at a ninety-degree angle. I dropped to my knees and stayed there, in the icy water, testing my extremities individually for any sign of numbness or weakness. I heard both Alf and Greg shout my name as they tumbled down the hill, but I was too breathless to do more than say softly, “I’m okay.”
I got up; and, more afraid of the fear than any injury, I insisted on one more flight. This happened on Friday. We had to leave Sunday after class for the long drive back to Mobile; it might be months before we could return. So, battered, I returned the next two days, unfruitfully, and left feeling deflated.
Residencies, especially surgical ones, allow little time off, and though Alf and I stole off on the Easter weekend to take another lesson, there was no progress and I became discouraged. When I left my residency and took a job as an emergency department physician, my off time was my own. Still trying to include Alf in my vision of flight, I booked a commercial flight to Chattanooga, figuring the long drive gave us too much time to argue. But, our relationship was strained to the maximum in the restricted spaces of trips and hotel rooms; at home we even had separate bedrooms. Togetherness was not us, not confined to our hotel by Hurricane Hugo’s dismal weather. No aviation occurred that weekend except that by the flight crew who piloted the planes we took.
I began to think I was something of a jinx when I came back to fly three weeks later and the San Francisco earthquake struck. It rained all that long week in October, breaking only long enough for a lesson here, a practice flight there. I was close, so close to leaving the little hill and graduating to the “big hill,” the 120-foot slope that was the next step to nirvana. There our more advanced brothers and sisters cavorted their gliders effortlessly, slipping gracefully from the face of their steeper hill, looking like moths when they crawled slowly up to fly again. I watched the younger and more athletic men follow the instructors’ directions exactly while I struggled, hunting for the combination of moves that would free me from the earth. I left that week, not sure that I would be back, feeling myself lacking some ingredient necessary in a hangglider pilot, feeling too old.
All the year and more I sat out, the hanggliding dream recurred to me regularly, beckoning. I would promise, “Yes, of course...someday, soon.” Then, the next fall, I was able to start writing again. Stymied by years spent in medical school and residency I had hesitated for months. I couldn’t make myself sit down to the keyboard, preferring to travel, play with computers, reread old things I had written in college. With friends’ help, I began to see that time of transition as a legitimate time of reflection, and, with nervous energy dissipated, I was able to start writing again. The poet’s question convinced me that the time to fly was now, though I had long since passed the imagined age limit of thirty. In March 1991, I rejoined the battle, beginning the summer of my hanggliding adventure when anything was possible and everyone was kind.
Returning was embarrassing. I had to explain to the other students the level of my skills. I had to admit that I had tried and dropped out, that I already had forty flights, that I flew in the face of the school’s advertisement to have one off the mountain in a week to ten days. That I was, bluntly, a failure. But, there was something else, something I hadn’t had the last time I came that rainy October week -- patience with the process. I was able, for the first time in my thirty-one restless years, to enjoy the journey. “Zen and the Art of Hanggliding,” I would murmur to myself whenever the old chafing arose.
I arrived early enough to walk the mile-long muddy road to the training site, leaving my new truck, bought specifically for glider transport, at the locked gate. I’d revel in the cool and the silence, look around the valley so thick with fog that it precluded launching from the little hill; I’d breath in the moisture and listen to the crows call across to each other. Then the other students would arrive and we’d break up the silence, chattering nervously as we assembled the practice gliders, gentle old things, patched and rebuilt countless times, forgiving of our gaucheries.
The four instructors are archetypes now, and the immediate sensation of each is lost. Christian, the chief instructor, was a quiet, moody man, generous in material things since he valued them so little, always having just the right words to make you smile at your own failures, quick with encouragement. Ricky, a rich man’s son from Puerto Rico, was full of ego and suggestion, so very sure of his own skills, so very full of words. Jim was fourteen forever, like a big puppy, energetic, helpful, chagrined at his own social failures, ever the optimist, not taking anything seriously. Rex was here for only one reason, to fly. The instructing was his support for an addictive habit, and he was easily the most relaxed of the teachers. He was “cool.”
I found them all attractive, and I’d be lying if I said it had never occurred to me to sleep with any of them. However, there was Alf, still a lump on my horizon, and there was flying and I’ve never cared to mix my obsessions. I dismiss it easily now, but I struggled with it all that summer, debating with myself continuously over Alf and how we stood, since he never engaged in the conversations I had with him. A love triangle would have ripped the peace of the place from me.
This time, because I didn’t beat myself over my failures, didn’t berate myself every time an instructor made a suggestion or correction, there was a lack of mental pain, of the need to please. I was only there for myself. Hanggliding was for me alone and no one would die and the world would still turn if I took six months or six years to learn to fly. I savored that thought on sweaty mornings.
Physically, it was a different matter -- there was plenty of pain. At first I pulled the gliders up and down the hills laboriously, cursing men and their muscles and wishing I’d had the foresight to take up weight lifting or running. After four or five flights and climbs, I became too tired to respond to my instructors, and would have to call it a morning. Then I discovered another use for men. BJ, airbum about town, permanent camper in the LZ, was a willing packhorse and accessory instructor for small fees, happy for the beer money. Though I had learned to carry the Raven properly now, balanced on my shoulder tips, I found BJ’s sturdy back and encouragement a blessing.
By early May I had loosened my tight grip, allowing the glider to fly, and began to understand the mechanics of launching, flying straight, and flaring to land gently on my feet. When I returned on Memorial Day weekend there were a dozen of us on the little hill, waiting for the rain to stop, and then awaiting our turns. It seemed that I would live forever on that little hill. The next morning was no better and so, when Rex offered to teach an evening class, I leapt at the chance, convinced it was the only way I’d get enough time on one of the gliders that weekend to graduate. My previous equanimity vanished; I was ready to fly. That afternoon I could make no error; flight after flight was perfect. When I came to my fifth in a row I was afraid I’d stumble at the finish. Rex, understanding, suggested I wait until the morning, but I chanced it and won, hooting and cheering as Rex called down, “You’re cleared!”
That night I brought the instructors four six-packs of beer, per custom, and ended up as another of Christian’s houseguests. The four of us sprawled around his trailer in the landing field as they regaled me with hanggliding stories and exaggerations and lies while I listened respectfully, soaking it in, proud of their approval, beginning to feel like a ‘real’ hangglider pilot.
The next morning I went to the big hill, exhausted from endless lessons, hungover, tired from poor sleep in a strange place, and tried to break my neck a second time. I clutched the downtubes, pulling the glider’s nose down, and dove over the crest of the hill, dragging along the ground until I hit a road carved from the side of the slope and ski-jumped to land nose-first. I remembered Christian’s warning, “When a crash is inevitable, go fetal.” I did and it worked, though, once again, it was my neck that was injured and I gingerly tested each limb. Almost as I hit, Ricky, my instructor, was there with me, checking me over. Then he made me sit in the shade with BJ until the shaking passed. I could not leave, not like that, so I dragged the wounded glider over and disassembled it to show everyone that I was functional.
I would leave for Mobile after morning classes and if I went away on that note, they’d make me return to the little hill. I wasn’t sure they wouldn’t do that anyway in the morning, and I practiced being gracefully resigned. I filled myself with ibuprofen and hid in the hotel room’s hot shower all day, unwilling to show myself and hear the good-natured jibes. In the morning I felt bruised but knew I needed to launch from the big hill. I sought Christian and timidly asked if I could. He measured me for a long moment, then said, “Sure.” I waited for the other students to go off ahead of me, though being the first with my glider up the hill I had the right to precede them. I was more wary of my reactions than the slope. I kept repeating, “It’s just a hill, just like the little hill. The glider doesn’t know it’s any higher.” Finally, after three other students, I went up to launch. Christian, instead of a reprimand, said only, “Let it fly, Jean; it wants to fly.” This was my mantra as I ran down the worn path in the grass toward the edge, thinking mechanically, remembering to smoothly accelerate, relax my hands, keep the nose angle correct, eyes forward, repeating motions I’d performed dozens of times, praying for the glider to capture the air for me. And it did. I was airborne, hanging four stories above the field, time passing infinitely slowly as my shadow ran through the uncut grass to my left, the wind indicator in front, my target, languorously approaching in the silence, barely stirring in the breeze. Then I was skimming the ground, my toes hitting mown stubble, and I threw my hands up in a victorious flare and settled to my feet. The cheers from behind me were delicious.
I had four more perfect flights that morning before leaving for Mobile. I felt I’d been given a medal when Christian said, “I’m glad you didn’t let the hill win.”
The camaraderie of the big hill was different from that on the little hill. Here were the “serious” ones, the ones who’d stuck it out and meant to finish, not to get a picture of themselves “hanggliding” from the little hill to show their friends, to check hanggliding off their list of “accomplishments.” It was a weekly picnic on the top -- we shared bottled water, bug repellent, sunblock, muddy harnesses, stinking sweat-soaked helmets, and gleanings of advice. We had more time to converse since we had more time “hang-waiting” due to the orientation of the slope, and we were no longer strangers, silent competitors, but colleagues and buddies.
There were also those among us who had already had their “first mountain” flights, but needed to come back for a refresher after being gone two or three weeks. No one was free of the threat of the big hill until they had several hours flying time. We picked the mountain pilots’ brains for details of their first flights. We asked again and again, “What was it like?” as if they were Marco Polo returned to Venice. What we got was the inarticulate descriptions of the first astronauts, “Oh, it was great!” Jim, the instructor most recently graduated to the mountain, had characterized it as, “Better than sex.”
“Second time sex,” he amended.
Because we had distinct tasks, the early weeks on the big hill passed swiftly. We had to turn the glider toward specific targets that represented different angles, then level out, fly straight, and land on our feet. The first angles were simply forty-five degrees, little challenge, but the next task required a sharp ninety-degree turn with “coordination,” a technique to minimize the glider “slipping” sidewise through the air and losing valuable altitude. I had no problem with this assignment either. Then came the double or linked forty-fives and nineties where we had to perform successive turns and land level. The “big” hill seemed to shrink. These tasks required faster reflexes than I possessed. I began to feel the old frustration by the third weekend I spent on the first of the two tasks, not helped by contrary winds that blew “tail,” or over the back, for the big hill. This meant I had to wait longer for lulls in which to launch, had less altitude and, therefore, less time, in which to execute my turns.
We began to mutter darkly about a virgin sacrifice to the wind gods, if we could find one. My only comfort was a selfish delight in anyone else’s difficulties. I was not the only one to feel clumsy. Three of us formed a chorus on the hill of “permanent students,” a title that, like an ethnic slur, was only funny within the group.
By dent of obstinacy, and not by patience, did I finally complete the double forty-fives, only to struggle with the next. I began to lose my serenity, my pseudo-Zen, as I saw the goal so close, just beyond my fingertips, and the baked summer greens of the valley no longer distracted me when I just missed a flare. Linked nineties, abetted by southerly winds, loomed like a wall beyond which I could see the mountain. I was ready for the mountain, I knew it, and it was maddening to have the forces of nature, and your instructors' particularity, stand in the way. I cried often, frustrated tears spilling silently, mixed with sweat, as I trudged the worn dirt path to the big hill. BJ followed with my glider, trying to think of something helpful he hadn’t already said.
And another Sunday rolled around, another next-to-last day of lessons; even if I finished the hill, there’d be no time to fly from the mountain. I woke late and disgusted, sore from yesterday’s unproductive evening class, with no time left to shower or more than brush my teeth at the outdoor faucet before setting off, dirty, hungry, and uncaffeinated, for class.
I arrived to find Janet, a fellow permanent hillmate, angry because another student had refused to share a glider with her, a definite breach of etiquette. We sat up top and commiserated with each other as the fog clung damply. When the wind finally developed to clear it at eight, it was our old friend the southwest tail. I got off a couple of worthless flights and then closed down, disassembling our glider. As I made for my truck, however, I noticed that three of the remaining gliders were launching and the wind had settled to light and variable from the west -- doable. I was tired and I was hungry, but I was determined to get off that blighted hill that weekend. So, I threw the glider back together, dragged myself up the hill and managed three more linked nineties, none perfect, all acceptable. Then I went back to do my “speed run”-- the easiest task -- and flubbed it. Class was over.
I knew that in the morning I would clear, that I would do fine, and I was cheered, but it was an incomplete victory. There was no afternoon class so I couldn’t clear that afternoon, and I wouldn’t have time to fly from the ramp tomorrow before I returned to Mobile. Since I wouldn’t be back in the Christian-mandated four days, those ogres disguised as instructors would require me to warm-up again on the big hill before I could fly off the mountain. And I didn’t trust the southwest wind not to reappear and confine me to the big hill all weekend, again. It was an unpromising situation. I felt subdued, not elated, as I drove up the mountain to the shop to take my “Hang II” test on the minute possibility that I could fly tomorrow. I made myself not hope, willing away anticipation so that I wouldn’t have to deal with the disappointment, deflecting the other students’ congratulations.
That evening I watched the “real” pilots launch, a little hungrily, thinking to each in turn, “I’ll fly as well as you someday, just watch.” I wished I could show off for Christian’s “tourons,” the people who came to gawk. Some of them came in wonder, staring at the rising gliders in desire. Many, however, stood breathless behind the fence or, when they saw that people didn't routinely stumble over the edge, on the rock ledge itself, awaiting the launches, certain of a crash, shivering with an anticipatory horror.
That night I sat under the pavilion in the landing zone, near my tent, with the remainder of the visiting pilots and Christian. We drank beer and stared at the brightly lit sky, the full moon staring back at us. We joked about night flights and I pretended I didn’t care when they told me it might be possible to launch after lessons, but there was doubt in their voices; the winds became too boisterous for beginners after ten. I pretended I didn’t care, though they were being kind, because disappointment would hurt and I was too heart-tired, too frayed with the wanting, to be graceful in frustration.
The next morning was foggy and gray and the valley was slow to lose its shroud. We camped on the hilltop and I hoped I’d not repeat yesterday’s disappointing flight. Finally it cleared enough for the instructor to see us land, and I launched into the gray stuff, stepping into the twilight zone, flying straight and fast, landing on one knee. There was no answering shout from Christian clearing me, so I climbed back up to hear his verdict. Christian’s mood was not good. He’d had two students in a row flub their launches, one almost repeating my disaster on the big hill; but he told me to go to the shop and see if Buzz would launch me. I left him shaking his head and muttering, “Someone left the brain-suck machine plugged in at the bottom of the hill.”
Inside I felt a pleasant humming, not bouncing joy, as I’d expected. It was as if I did not dare believe that I, clumsy, unathletic I, was going to run off the fearsome ramp and fly to the LZ 1340 feet below, on my own. Christian had, several times, offered to take me on a tandem ride, for free, but I always politely rejected the chance. I chose to go on my own the first time; I wanted to fly myself. I flounced into the shop, grinned at Joanne, but asking hesitantly, “I passed; is it too late for me to launch?”
Joanne warmly congratulated me, then said, “Heck no. Go set up.”
I ran out, full of energy, and assembled my glider to an audience of one imported pilot who had not yet flown from Lookout. He asked dozens of questions, mostly aimed at showing his own extensive knowledge, and I tried, helpfully, to answer him, but I was preoccupied and too excited to take him as seriously as he wanted. I assembled my other gear and awaited Buzz, rereading my already memorized handouts, but mainly staring unthinking over the valley, just now being revealed. The mist stayed low, surrounding the foothills, revealing only their tops, and making Lookout Mountain, and the next ridge west, Sand Mountain, look like peninsulas in an icy sea. Finally, Buzz arrived, looked out into the valley and said, “Come on, Jean, we’d better hurry.” I trotted along behind him, remembering his reputation for verbose preflight instructions and reminding myself not to hope; it was almost ten. Buzz is a careful pilot with two decades of experience and he likes to make sure that the students are aware of the dangers; by the time I finished I felt able to handle anything this launch might offer on a sled-run. (Ignorance is bliss.)
Released from the classroom, I raced outside, wriggled into my harness, strapped on my helmet, shouldered my glider, and staggered to the ramp for a “hang-check,” to make certain I was hooked in. I heard Buzz giving me last minute advice, but I was already flying in my head, not afraid, so, when he said, “Take it slow, Jean. Take a deep breath and get balanced, then launch whenever you feel ready; there’s no hurry,” hardly a second passed before I called, “Clear.”
I started my run, unwilling to stand a moment more on the ramp contemplating the long plummet to the valley. As I came to the end of the ramp I expected my stomach to drop, but there was no sense of falling, only of settling into the air. I felt suspended, a thousand feet above the trees; the world below me moved and not I. I looked down repeatedly to see that there was nothing but clean air between the glider and the valley. It was isolation, and freedom. No one could talk to me, reprimand, advise, or demand things of me, not until I landed. I was flying -- I, alone. I dutifully focused my mind on the assigned tasks, designed to keep us aware of the mechanics of flying lest we become mesmerized into forgetting the hard stuff below. I pulled in on the control bar to attain various speeds and tried to find my landmarks as I approached the LZ, but all the while I was thinking to myself, humming to myself, “You did it. You finally, really, eighteen years later, did it,” as treetops below crept backwards and Sand Mountain, across the valley, slowly approached.
It was a pedestrian sled-run of a flight, no excitement anywhere except to the infant pilot, not even the sensation of flying until just before landing when I was low enough to see the tops of sixty foot trees rush by. It was amazing to me and as thrilling as when I first discovered sex. I had the same internal feeling of, “Oh, so this is it. This is it....” In the end I did allow myself to become hypnotized, rolling in on my wheels before I knew I was low enough to flare, but I didn’t care. I had flown and I had landed. I bounced across the LZ in an excess of released tension and sang the long drive back to Mobile.
If I had been consistent and stubborn throughout the spring and summer, faithfully driving to Chattanooga after 24-hour shifts every weekend I was off, then I became slightly obsessed that fall. Any time I wasn’t working I was staring out the windows trying to figure conditions. Clouds and sky became a topic of constant comment. I no longer waited for the weekends, driving up any time I had three days off in a row. I had to return to the hills to clear on my new glider, the work of a long weekend, albeit without BJ’s customary help since he was in the hospital for non-hanggliding related complaints. I developed blisters on my shoulders from carrying the glider up the little hill seven times in one morning, but fortunately found help in the form of two Bills. The first was a marine and new hangglider pilot, returned from the Gulf War, who gratefully toted my glider after I fed him boiled shrimp I had brought from Mobile for the instructors. The second was an Air Force flight instructor from Columbus, MS, also a hangglider pilot, who needed extra beer money. Alf, too, showed up, but things were fraying between us and I stayed in my tent in the LZ, my haven from him and problems in Mobile, while he went to Tiftonia to sleep in the Holiday Inn.
But, the weather gods can be fickle; the flights I managed on my new glider over the next six weeks were few. I developed my hang-waiting skills. I remember one particularly trying weekend at the end of September when I had managed five days off in a row. I arrived to find a storm front, colder than my Mobile wardrobe made comfortable, followed by easterly winds (the wrong direction), followed by winds too brisk for a novice. By the end of it I was exhausted from hoping too long and waiting hours each day on the sunny ramp, staring at the wind indicators, afraid the winds would sneakily decide to accommodate me if I left for an hour. I drove the instructors into hiding with my constant requests that they come out and “check conditions”-- usually no different than they’d been an hour before. Christian labeled me “air-horny.” The punchline came the morning I finally had to leave for work -- the newer mountain pilots launched within the hour. Still, the fall days were a treasure when I did manage a sled-run in the morning. Then I was content to play driver and retrieve Rex and Ricky and other advanced pilots, when they flew cross-country. They, in turn, taught me weather conditions, shared their beer, told me war stories, and made me their “buddy.” I learned to look for wind direction from the clouds, pond ripples, and smoke, to know when a thermal was developing and find it marked by a cumulus puff. It was a hot, vivacious fall full of days spent on dusty launches watching my friends fly. And I was finally able, on my ninth mountain flight, to soar above the ridge.
It was the same weekend I realized that Christian was as fascinated with me as I was with him. We sat up until two that Saturday morning, the twelfth of October, after my usual drive up following a Thursday night on duty. I was so gratified that this quiet man I liked and admired had had similar feelings for me the long summer, hesitant to show it since I was “taken.” We sat outside my tent for hours in the damp air, afraid to go in, still jealous of our reputations, saying everything we’d been thinking those months. Then the all-too-soon morning had me warming up on the hills. I came back for a nap, but Dave Curry, my old instructor, had a bad landing and dislocated his shoulder. I had to take him to the nearest hospital, after a not unexpected failure to reduce it in the LZ.
I was buzzing with exhaustion when we returned late that afternoon, but the winds had picked up and the word among us new mountain pilots was that it was easily ridge-soarable. I drove up the mountain to check, running on epinephrine. A “wonder wind,” smooth soarable air that is God’s gift to the novice hangglider pilot, was brewing and I sought out Matt since all his instructors were at evening classes. He asked me how many flights I’d had, considering. I muttered the miserable number, “Eight.” He said, “Well, you’re a solid pilot, let it wait a little longer to quiet in the LZ and I’ll launch you after six.” I could have kissed him.
I assembled my glider carefully, checking every bolt, watching pilot after pilot lift off from the wirecrew up into the sky and prayed it would continue until I had my chance. At six the wind still blew, inviting me. Since it was my first wire launch, Matt called it for me, telling the fellow pilots who held me down to the ramp to shout “up,” “down,” or “neutral,” depending on what the wings were doing. I stood there with tingling, sweating palms, wondering if I was taking on more than I should, then suddenly letting go, deciding that I had to trust Matt. He wouldn’t let me do this if he thought I wasn’t able. I concentrated hard on the chorus of “up,” “up,” and “strong up,” that surrounded me until Matt called, “Go, Jean!” Suddenly, I was the one on that elevator, the one being carried straight to heaven, swiftly, smoothly, silently. I turned to my left watching the trees on the bluff drift downward, away from me, waving me on. The air was sweet and thick all around me, golden with sunset. I was flying, not falling, actually climbing. I turned when I wanted, went where I wanted, looked on the ground from a height I’d only seen in airplanes where I was cut off from the earth. Here, now, I was a part of it, perched on its rim, three-dimensional in motion, giddy with excitement. I laughed and shouted, not caring who heard me, talking to God and my mother and Matt and my instructors, “Thank-you, thank-you. Thank-you for this moment!”
I boated around in that generous air for fifty minutes. My glider and dozens of others weaving together like a hoard of butterflies, dancing with the wind until the sun was only a comma above Sand across the valley and I knew I must land or risk my instructors’ disapproval. But, I didn’t want to leave that air, that gift, afraid it might be weeks, months again, before I had this time in heaven, this freedom. Finally, fighting a wind that wanted me still, I spiraled lazily to the landing zone and rolled-in on soft turf. I literally skipped all over that field, hugging everyone, boring them with the details of my flight, one they had all made years before, but they listened, smiling. Then they laughed with me, congratulated me, teased me over the grass stains on my knees, hugged me and handed me a beer. My first soaring flight, and there would be many more years of this to come.

[JC1]

Hello out there

2004-12-06T11:17:00.000-04:00

Hanggliding, surfing, snowboarding, sailing, kayaking, I want no engines. I want just me and the elements, though not much surfing goes on in Northwest Georgia. The hanggliding is quite good here when the weather cooperates (and work doesn't suck up your time.)

The rain has been on a grand scale this year, and the work has been equally consuming ("I don't love it, I don't hate it, it's what I do") so that I hesitate to even label myself a hangglider pilot based on the number of flights and amount of time I have spent in the air. I've had more time on the water in a flat-water kayak (can do THAT in the rain, at least) on the Tennessee River than I have in the air over Lookout Mountain. http://www.hanglide.com

Snowboarding has to be done elsewhere, as well, and I am hoping for a trip to Snowshoe Mtn. in WV this winter since driving looks cheaper than flying to Austria or out west for a brief vacation. I'm feeling rusty on all my athletic skills after a year of divorce and neglect. It's a little hard to motivate when the new man in your life is not an outdoorsy type, preferring bedsports and lazy mornings, to early risings to scout the slopes. He's game for anything, but not enthusiastic about rousting out the lift crew at 0600.

Speaking of whom, he is, currently asleep, curled in a nest of covers, no doubt dreaming of delicious things to do to me with the equipment he has artfully strung on the wall.