Angst

The kids are home, where am I?

It's been almost a year since I moved out. The kids have been home from boarding school for March vacation, the summer, Thanksgiving, and now it's their three week Christmas vacation. W and I are separated, and I just have a place in a group house in the next town over. She's in our old house still, and that's where they stay, that's where their friends are, and that's the only home they remember. Since Thanksgiving I've finally started making my apartment my own space, even though that has meant taking some of my things out of W's house. The holes left by what I take hurt me, but most was from my home office, and now a little bit from my library there. I worry about what the kids will think when they see the holes I've left behind. I even worry about my in-laws, who have been living there since last May (stuck here waiting for a citizenship application to go through (it did!) and afraid to return to Iran with the current unrest and suspicion there against Iranian's traveling to the U.S. (Ironically, the U.S. is home to the second-largest Iranian population in the world—L.A.. 40% of Beverly Hills is made up of Iranians, mostly Jewish, who fled the revolution.) But I digress.)

Continue reading The kids are home, where am I?
Dec 19, 2009 2:34 PM

View Comments

How do you punish a Master?

Closer to Fine

I stopped by the bar at 3 a.m.
To seek solace in a bottle or possibly a friend
I woke up with a headache like my head against a board
Twice as cloudy as I'd been the night before
I went in seeking clarity.

I went to the doctor, I went to the mountains
I looked to the children, I drank from the fountain
There's more than one answer to these questions
pointing me in crooked line
The less I seek my source for some definitive
The closer I am to fine.

D/s culture replete with ways to punish a submissive, but what happens when the Master goes astray and hurts the submissive? Who punishes him?

The answer is quite simple. The Master punishes himself.

Whether the relationship is for a single scene or a life time. Whether it takes place in a club, a bedroom, or across the internet. Whether it's for show, for play, or fundamental Need. No matter what the time, the setting, or the reason; the Master took on a responsibility to care for the submissive. Her well-being becomes not just his responsibility, it becomes his well-being. Just as her pleasure becomes his pleasure, so her pain becomes his pain. You cannot have one without the other. So long as the relationship exists, the two are bound, not just together, but within each other. Pleasure and pain. Trust and responsibility. Master and submissive. One being.

Continue reading How do you punish a Master?
Dec 15, 2009 2:11 PM

View Comments

Why Coyote?

The Coyote Road

Edited by Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling

I've been asked a number of times why I chose Coyote as my online identity/avatar/totem. The answer is very clear in my mind, but not so easy to express to those who aren't familiar with Coyote. I read (and occasionally heard) Coyote tales at a young age. In college I studied the broader Trickster motifs as well. Then for many years they lay dormant in my mind, until I reached a time when I needed to change who I was.

Coyote resonates within me; with where I am in my life. I first realized it a little over a year ago, when I was reading a number of stories and books by Charles de Lint. Coyote wanders in and out of de Lint stories, just as he meanders through "traditional" folk stories. I went back and re-read the earlier Coyote tales I knew, and I realized that I identified with Coyote's constant desire to get involved and fix things, and his equally common failure to get it right. That's not surprising, because Coyote is really a representation of what it means to be human; sometimes selfish, sometimes selfless, but never static. Humans are the Creator, the Fixer, the Breaker, and the Learner. Coyote's not so great at the Learning part, but then, neither are humans.

Continue reading Why Coyote?
Dec 12, 2009 5:04 PM

View Comments

r