Kinky Advent, Week I

KINKY ADVENT, WEEK I

The Christmas season began in the middle of September. The Christmas season began on November 27th. The Christmas season began on November 28th. The Christmas season begins today. The Christmas season will begin tomorrow. (Unless you’re one of these “Let’s keep Christmas in our hearts all year long” goofballs, in which case the Christmas season began way back on January 7th. In which case the Christmas season began way back on December 26th of last year.)

In order to know when the Christmas season begins, you first have to answer the question: Just what the fuck is the Christmas season? How is it defined? What does it include?

Is Christmas a four month long (and sadly growing) consumer season? Wal*Mart started selling Christmas merchandise in mid-September. A lot of people these days tend to dismiss Thanksgiving and New Years as not being individual holidays, and just sort of lump them into ‘the Winter Holiday season’, which is just the culturally diverse term for ‘the Christmas season’. And Thanksgiving was three days ago. Is Christmas a roughly month long consumer season? Black Friday (“biggest shopping day of the year”) was two days ago. Is Christmas a Christian holiday, the build up to which is the season of Advent? Advent (marked by the four Sundays leading up to Christmas) begins today. Advent (marked by the 24 days leading up to Christmas) begins tomorrow. Is your head spinning yet?

[The next question is: When does the Christmas season end? With Christmas Day? Boxing day (day after Christmas, and the biggest return/exchange day of the year)? New Year’s? (Eve or Day, take your pick.) The Epiphany (January 6th)?]

When I was growing up, Christmas always started about halfway through Thanksgiving day. Once Thanksgiving dinner was over and we were back home, it was ‘officially’ the start of the Christmas season. Christmas music could start being played. The decorations could start going up. I was finally allowed to start work on my Christmas wish list (that was already over a page long due to having violated the nothing-until-after-Thanksgiving rule by working on it in secret). Once Thanksgiving was over, it started to feel like Christmastime.

But really, that was only the beginning of a several day long pre-season. Because the Christmas season really and truly begins for me on December 1st. The beginning of the 24 day long Advent countdown to Christmas day.

I thought about turning my blog entirely Christmas themed (naughty Christmas themed) for the first 24 days of December, and posting something each and every day. When I finally stopped laughing at that notion (I have no internet access!) I instead wondered about doing a four-part Christmas-y series posted the four weeks of the other version of Advent. The four Sundays thing. That seemed much more plausible to me. Far more doable.

And what do I choose to talk about in this, the first of a four part Sunday Advent post? Why, the 24 day version of Advent, of course. Or, you know, the potential for the perversion of it.

Oh, don’t look at me like that, uptight Christian people. Advent calendars all started out with Nativity images and the like, but now most of the ones I see are of Santa. Or if not Santa and elves and whatnot, they’re at least belief-neutral, and composed of images of wreaths and bells and candles and holly and sleds and snowmen and so on. It’s not like nobody has ever taken the concept of Advent and bent it for commercial or secular purposes already. How many children are raised to believe that the Advent season is counting down until the arrival of Santa? All I’m doing is trying to help out with an adults-only version of Advent. Give the season a little kick by giving it a little kink.

Our lives are controlled by our awareness of the passage of time. Which means that the Advent season is controlled by the Advent calendar. The classic Advent calendar is the two-sheets glued together affair, with the upper sheet containing perforated numbered windows and the bottom sheet containing the images that show through those windows once opened. Gaining in popularity these days are the thicker calendars whose windows open to reveal a small piece of chocolate. This is usually what people mean when they say ‘Advent calendar’.

There is absolutely no reason at all why you should feel obligated to stick to that format.

Twenty four. That’s the key. If it’s an object, series of objects, or even just concept that allows you – day by day – to count to twenty four, then it can make a fine Advent calendar. I have spoken. Thus is it so.

Ladies, a good, fairly inexpensive Advent calendar for your fella that doesn’t even require a whole lot of creative thinking can be as simple as a 24 pack of condoms. (I, personally would be thrilled to receive 24 condoms from a sexy adult female – the implication being that I get to use them, one a day counting down to Christmas, on/in her – as an Advent calendar.) You could even get a Sharpie marker and write the letter “V” on most of them, throwing in a few “O” and “A”s for the occasional oral and anal sex act if you wanted to mix things up a little.

You could also use the condom as just the symbol of a sex act, and get different brands/colors and make a what-color-means-what-act chart. Certainly, use them for protection on the days when that particular color of condom means PIV intercourse, or anal. (Or oral, if you use condoms for oral). But also have condoms that are simply there to signify that on that day, the act is a handjob. Or a footjob. Or a round of tit fucking. Or that you’re going to masturbate and talk dirty to him while he jacks off onto your face. Wherever the personal kinks and desires run.

Guys, if your significant other is always desperately eager to have your cock buried deep inside of her, then the box of condoms thing could work as an Advent calendar for her, too. But seriously . . . think about this before proceeding. If she’s going to stand there staring at you, slowly asking, “Let me get this straight . . . your Advent present to me is that I’ve got to find time in my busy schedule each day to let you fuck me? Oh, thanks a bunch, jackass” then it’s probably not really a present for her now, is it. (A 24 pack of dental dams, on the other hand, might tell a different story.)

Last week I was skimming a thread on FetLife while sitting at the library started by a woman who was putting together a ’12 days of Christmas’ list for her boyfriend. She was asking for help, because she only had 10 items, and needed two more. I thought that I had gone up into the menu and clicked on SAVE PAGE AS, but the thread apparently didn’t make it onto my flash drive, because it’s not in my ‘Stuff via Flash Drive’ folder. Sadly, the only item off of her list that I can remember is that one of those 12 days was Photo Fun day, and she would pose for his camera, letting him take as many nude pictures of her as he wanted. My faulty memory is asking, “Was there an ‘outdoor sex’ day?” which means that there might have been. (It’s also asking if there might have been a fisting day, but since that’s one of my big fantasies, that’s probably just me wishing that someone was granting me a fisting day.)

But if you take her basic concept, double it, and move it from Christmas through Epiphany to December 1st through Christmas Eve, then you’ve got a great kinky Advent calendar. A series of very specific fantasy sex acts on specific days makes for a wildly erotic Christmas countdown.

A naughty Advent calendar could be as simple as a slow holiday striptease, captured in digital photography and converted to hardcopy with your photo printer (or your friend’s photo printer – or heck, just get prints made at the Wal*Mart Photo Dept. if you’ve got any serious exhibitionist tendencies.) Digital camera with a timer and a tripod. Nice lingerie, nice clothes, maybe even a jacket and scarf if you’re looking for ways to stretch it out to 24 photos. Slowly strip for the camera. Be sliding your panties down your legs, facing away from the camera with your bare ass aimed at the lens for day 22. Turn around for full frontal on the 23rd. Lay back in a sexy “Merry Christmas – Come Get Your Present” pose on the 24th (legs spread wide if you’re a particularly dirty girl). Each photo then gets placed in a red or green envelope (alternating colors each day) labeled with the countdown numbers. Stick the whole thing in a box, and you’re good to go.

Back in 1983 my mother invented something called the Advent basket. (I’m not claiming that she was it’s sole inventor throughout the history of time. Nor that she was the basic idea’s first ever Patient Zero. Heck, the telephone was invented by two people working separately, and we only know the name Alexander Graham Bell because he arrived at the patent office a half hour before the other guy. Or so the story goes.) Instead of a normal calendar, Mom put together a basket of small, inexpensive gifts for my grandmother for Advent the year after Grandpa died. Each one was individually wrapped, and bright little stickers numbered them #1 through #24.

She did an Advent basket for Grandma each year until she (Grandma) died. Somewhere along the line, she did one for me one year too. Which opened up the dam and slowly turned her into an Advent basket machine. Grandma, me, my brother and sister, Dad, a cousin or two, a few family friends . . . my mother was a small Advent basket industry unto herself. Now that Mom’s gone, my sister has continued the tradition on a much smaller delivery scale. I get one, my brother gets one, his wife gets one. One or two others from year to year.

I’ve done two or three Advent baskets in my time. I did one for Mom (which she was NOT expecting, and the look on her face was well worth the work that went into the thing). I did one for Casper one year. I always intended to do one for CJ, but for one reason or another I don’t think I ever did.

Anyway, the Advent basket is something that you could easily do a kinky version of. It’s best considered a year-long project. ‘Inexpensive’ has a whole different meaning if you’re picking things up all year long than it does if you doing all of your Advent basket shopping in late November. Either way, it’s going to cost you the average price of a item times 24 gifts. But if filling the Advent basket is competing with the rest of your late November Christmas shopping, then even just scraping together $24 for the project, you’re looking at a basket full of one dollar items. On the other hand, if you start the next year’s basket in December, and pick up just two items a month, you’ll have all 24 by November. Spend $10 a month on it, and the basket is filled with an average $5 per gift. (This has been your patronizing math lesson for the day.)

So what all goes into a kinky Advent basket? Well, as always, it’s going to depend on gender, preference, specific kinks, level of perversion, and all that good stuff. But right off the top of my head, I’m going to list off items like: massage oil, flavored lube, inexpensive penetration toys (like a cheap green dildo and cheap red vibrator on consecutive days for holiday-themed masturbation fun), a low-priced porn DVD, a porn magazine, a 3-pack of condoms (again, with the condoms?), cock rings, sample sized jars of liquid latex, sexy jewelry (like clit jewelry, or toe rings, or shiny new things for the pierced navel), an erotic novel, a coupon good for a threesome with Zeitgeist the Clown (hey, it could happen!), spanking toys (wooden spoons from the dollar store to average out a higher priced item, maybe?), candles for wax play, frilly underthings, and so on and so forth.

One of my favorite concepts for the Advent season is something I refer to as “The Advent Novel”. A twenty-four chapter long story, intended to be read one chapter a day until Christmas.

The first Advent novel I plotted was completely non-erotic. But me being me, I eventually started coming up with naughtier ideas than So-and-So and His Sidekick Save Christmas. Any amateur erotica wordsmiths out there whose significant other really digs your prose? Schedule yourself a little time at some point during the year and write a dirty little Advent novel. (Make it next year’s National Novel Writing Month project. End up with 24 chapters around 2000 words each – a little less if you want to throw in a November 30th prologue and Christmas Day epilogue.)

One of the projects that I’ve wanted to write for years now has been an Advent novel, entitled “Faith and Fetish”. (‘Faith’ being the first name of the lovely Mrs. Claus in my personal version of the Santa mythos.) In addition to having the standard 24 chapters that I envision all true Advent novels having, this one is also outlined to include a prologue and an epilogue. The prologue sets up the whole point of the work, giving us the following personal information about the lives of Santa Claus and the Mrs.

Santa and Faith have a very satisfying sex life eleven months out of the year. But in December – being occupied with the preparations for Christmas – he pretty much ignores her sexual needs. She spends most nights masturbating beside him in bed while he snores. But not this year. No, this year, she’s decided that she’s going to take the kink and fetish that they use (on occasion) to spice up their love making and put it to work for her, keeping him so horny throughout the month that he can’t possibly wait until after the holidays to get his hands (and other body parts) on her again.

So what does she all tempt him with over the course of the Christmas countdown? Oh, the normal stuff. Oral. Anal. Porn. Foot fetish stuff. Spanking. Age play. Voyeurism. Outdoor sex (yes, at the North Pole). Animal roleplay (inspired by an Olivia de Berardinis painting of a woman wearing a pair of reindeer antlers and a harness with jingle bells). Fisting. Wax play. A request for a facial. A little strap-on play. And more. (Santa doesn’t stand a chance.)

[This is one of those projects that will almost certainly get written during the first year after I finally crack my writer’s block problems, simply because of how much I want to have the completed project in hand every late November.]

Hopefully, I’ve given you some ideas to ponder. Here on the day before the 24 day Advent countdown begins. Huh. My timing, as always, seems to be impeccable.

Well, really, a lot of this stuff requires more preptime to do properly than you’d’ve had even if I’d’ve written this post a couple of weeks ago. So this is your chance to get a start on a project for next year. Get a jump on next year’s Advent calendar, in the hopes of inspiring your partner to jump you.

And next Sunday (assuming that I can get to the library to get the thing posted ON Sunday) will be part two of this series, wherein we continue to look at kinkifying the holidays. [And why, oh why, doesn’t my spellchecker recognize the work ‘kinkifying’?]

Dear Santa

Well, it’s now just a month ‘till Christmas. 30 shopping days left, and all that nonsense. Just a couple more days and Black Friday triggers the transition from the holiday pre-season (which – at Wal*Mart this year – was the season immediately following “Back to School”, running alongside Halloween throughout October) to the actual madhouse Christmas shopping season of frenzy! Woo-hoo-hoo-hoo!

A month until Christmas means a month minus one day before Santa launches the sleigh-and-eight for the Christmas run, dropping off presents for those deserving. Which means that it’s definitely time for me to write my annual letter to Santa.

Santa’s actually going to get a couple of letters from me this year. I’m a firm believer in writing a Christmas Wish List in “Letter-to-Santa” format, so that instead of just a list of crap you’d like to have, you can do things like explain why you want some of the stuff (which sometimes increases your chances of getting said crap from friends and relatives who would otherwise just scoff at some of your wants and move on), and go into further details if you’re picky about things. But I’ve decided not to bore my blog readers with my normal, mundane Christmas list. (Just like I’ve decided not to give heart attacks and aneurisms to elderly relatives by showing them the list that I’m presenting here today.)

Anyway, without further ado (because I honestly think that I’ve used just the exact right amount of ado), here’s this year’s letter to Santa – the BDSM version.

* ** *** ** *

Dear Santa,

I’ve been very good this year. I’ve been trying to get out of the house more. I’ve put forth an effort to develop some kind of social life. Been going to the library to use the internet so I’m at least somewhat more connected to the world than I have been in recent years. I’ve even started blogging again.

I can only hope that you’ve considered all of this and put my name on the special naughty version of the adult nice list. Or is that the nice version of the naughty list? I can never remember how that goes. You know which list I mean. The sex list. The one that has you bringing the girls and boys on it the ‘special’ toys. (And maybe hooks them up with other like minded boys and girls through Santa’s special holiday pervert matching service.)

On the chance that I’m right about being on a list that might get me presents, I thought I’d send along a list of presents I’d like. As always, I’ve categorized them for your convenience. (And yes, I’ll also be sending you a letter containing a list of non-‘naughty’ items I like under separate cover.)

BONDAGE GEAR

Somewhere in a box in the back of my closet I’ve got two pair of police-style handcuffs and a pair of matching leg irons. I’ve been told that these are not ideal for bondage games, and when I think back and remember the marks they sometimes left on CJ’s wrists and ankles, I can understand why. (And she didn’t really even struggle all that much).

I’d like a basic set of wrist and ankle cuffs to start with. I don’t need anything fancy, just the simple (leather?) strap with a metal hasp at one end, a series of slits at the other and an attached D-ring in the middle.

I’d also like to obtain a collar that I can secure around a submissive’s neck. Not an “I am your Master and you are now my collared slave” collar, but a simple, “I will now attach a leash and walk you like a dog” collar. (And now I think that I will need to talk about collars in a forthcoming post on my blog.)

Where there are bondage cuffs and collars, there are also padlocks. I prefer the use of keys to combination dials, and I’d prefer a series of keyed-alike padlocks to having to deal with a big ring of keys when it’s time to unbind my play partner.

Other bondage equipment I wouldn’t mind finding beneath the tree as accessories to things like a collar and cuffs are carabiners, snap-hooks, and various lengths of chain.

And Santa, if you (or whomever) wanted to hook me up with a set or two of spreader bars, I certainly wouldn’t complain. (My first exposure to the concept of spreader bars was in the first ever bondage magazine I ever saw, and it quickly became the source of many a fantasy.)

S&M TOYS

Right now the entirety of my impact toy collection is a single paddle. Purchased in the vendor’s room at KinkFest, it’s almost an inch and a quarter wide, about a half-inch thick, and about 17 inches long, not counting the grip. It’s a nice hard piece of wood painted black, with one side covered in leather (well, some kind of tanned animal hide looking product, anyway) to give you the option of ‘thud’ vs. the unadorned side’s ‘sting’.

I’m sure that I could find a use for more paddles, given the opportunity. I’d like to have a standard ping-pong (or at least ping-pong style) paddle in my assortment of spanking tools. One of those leather-strap-on-a-wooden-handle paddles look like they’d be fun to wield, too. As would a leather ‘slapper’. Spanky, spanky!

I don’t see myself ever really being comfortable using a classic single-tail whip. A whip requires too much precision, and not only do I have poor aim to begin with, but I also twitch at inopportune moments. If I wielded a whip, I’d probably take somebody’s eye out. So: Not really a good implement for me.

I like the look of a flogger, however. A shorter business end (or ends, to be accurate), less likely to snake out and wrap around areas I wasn’t trying to hit. I could see me with an eventual collection of floggers. Currently I have none. So getting a nice beginner’s flogger would make a nice Christmas gift. (Getting a buffalo hide flogger from WIAN Studios would make the ideal Christmas gift, since I have a thing for buffalo – collector-wise, not sexually – but I understand that with so many good boys and girls (and naughty men and women) to get presents for, you’re probably on a budget, so . . . I’ll be happy with whatever I can get.)

Aside from impact, I also like the thought of torturing a nice innocent pair of nipples. (Heh heh.) I’d like to have a pair of nipple clamps in my toybag, so that if I find the occasion to work somebody’s nipples over in the near future, I can do it properly. And speaking of my toybag . . .

TOYBAG

In addition to bondage gear and S&M toys, I also need a place for bondage gear and S&M toys to live when they’re not in use. The humble toybag.

I found the perfect toybag in a catalog earlier this year, but I didn’t buy it at the time, and it’s now sold out. Putting an emphasis on the “toy” in toybag, this item was a LEGO Store exclusive, and was shaped like a blue 2 stud x 4 stud LEGO brick set on it’s side with a carry handle and shoulder strap. Stated measurements were 17” long, 8” high, and 6.5” deep. For a starting toybag, do I really need anything bigger? Plus, all of the ‘studs’ unzip to reveal little compartments “perfect for LEGO bricks” (or, as my brain told me: latex gloves, condoms, lube, padlocks, carabiners, etc.) This is still ideally what I’d like to have as my first toybag, but really, any kind of easily transportable storage container will do.

SAFE SEX SUPPLIES

At some point in the mid-90s, I spent some time masturbating into condoms in an effort to see what fit and what didn’t. A brand called Kimono was the best fit I could find. Everything else was . . . well, it wasn’t exactly like a little kid playing dress-up in his dad’s clothes, but it was certainly bigger than it needed to be in order to stay on properly. I can’t seem to find Kimono condoms on the shelves anymore. So it looks like I need to start looking for a new brand again.

So I find myself in need of another assortment of condoms. What I’d like is just a few condoms each of each of the brands that the internet says are better for people with smaller than average endowment. So that I can once again do the trial and error thing to see what fits me best. Because I’d like to be able to know what brand of condom is going to fit me best when I finally find that thus-far-elusive woman who will lay down and spread her legs, all eager to wrestle my virginity away from me.

MASTURBATION TOYS

CJ once told me that she thought about buying me a naughty little something, but eventually decided against it because, “boy’s toys are so much more expensive than girl’s toys”. Sad, but true. Looking into the situation myself, I discovered how right she was, and thus don’t really have any toys designed for pleasuring the male anatomy.

I’d really like to have a Fleshlight. I’ve gotta put my cock somewhere, and it might as well be in a soft, squishy fuckable tube in a fake flashlight housing, right? I’ve wanted one of these things for years now, ever since I first saw ads for them on some website or another. Crazy! (Better yet, crazy and fuckable!)

I also want a RealDoll. Normally on a Christmas wishlist like this I’d go to the RealDoll website, go through construction step-by-step, and give you a detailed recipe of what I wanted. (In case Santa thought that I’d been a VERY good boy, or someone else wanting to buy me a present had just hit the lottery for billions of dollars. You never know.) But with my only source of internet currently being the library, my attempts to reach the RealDoll site only met with the familiar pornography filter screen. So . . . redhead. Longish hair. Small-to-average breasts. Actually, just base her on the classic (Barbra Gordon) Batgirl so that she’ll look good once I get someone to make the appropriate costume for her, and I’ll be fine. Either that, or contact me for detailed specifics. Whichever.

BOOKS

I’ve read very few books on the subject of BDSM. I’ve read Jay Wiseman’s “SM101” (which I found to be entertainingly written and informative). I’ve read Dossie Easton and Janet W. Hardy’s “The New Topping Book”, which was a fairly quick read with what seemed like solid info contained therein. I’ve also read a couple of the Toybag Guides (one on High Tech Toys, and Lee Harrington’s book on Age Play), neither of which I can find at the moment, but both of which I’ve been meaning to reread. I also have a copy of “The Ethical Slut” (by Easton and Hardy, if I remember right), but haven’t gotten around to reading it yet. So basically, if it’s a good, entertaining, informative, and useful BDSM or Sexuality manual and I didn’t just list it, then I still need it.

But as with anything else, there are a few specific books that I want/desire/need more than others . . .

The book I want most is “Big Big Love: A Sourcebook on Sex for People of Size and Those Who Love Them” by Hanne Blank. All the descriptions of this book that I’ve read make it sound like it’s “How to Fuck if You’re a Giant 450 lb Lard-Ass (Especially If You’re Into Plump Partners)”. Which is exactly what I need, given that I’m a 450 lb lard-ass, and was physically unable to fuck the one (coincidentally plump) woman who had been willing to let me, way back when. This was published by Greenery Press and is apparently out of print at the moment. (Why it’s out of print when McDonald’s and Hostess are still open for business, I can’t quite explain.) So it’s probably going to end up being an eBay find, or something along those lines.

“Screw the Roses, Send Me the Thorns – The Romance and Sexual Sorcery of Sadomasochism” by Phillip Miller and Molly Devon. This is one of the main books that people in the BDSM community suggest I read when they realize that there’s a newbie standing amongst them.

Having read the “The New Topping Book” I find that I want to read it’s counterpart (“The New Bottoming Book” by Dossie Easton and Janet W. Hardy) so that I can see things from the other perspective.

Given my interest in putting a hard paddle to a nice round bare bottom, my desire for a book titled “The Compleat Spanker” by Lady Green is something of a no-brainer. This appears to be THE primer on spanking, and that’s what I want.

I’d also really like “The Loving Dominant” by John Warren, “Different Loving – The World of Sexual Dominance and Submission” by William and Gloria Brame, and “The Toybag Guide to Foot and Shoe Worship” by Midori.

PORN

I was getting porn long before I was getting internet. I was looking at porn before there even was internet. (Yes, I’m just that old.) So I still see porn magazines as a valuable part of one’s masturbation fantasy repertoire. And while it’s been ages since I’ve purchased an issue of Penthouse or Penthouse Letters (the old standbys, back in the day), I will on occasion have the opportunity to grab an adult shop discount magazine three pack containing (among other oddball titles) an issue of Leg Action Magazine.

I’ve looked at a bunch of different special interest titles for my particular special interest: Leg Tease, Leg Show, Hot Legs, and other obvious Foot Fetish magazines all with ‘Leg’ in the title and the word ‘Foot’ completely absent. (Being a ‘leg man’ is perfectly acceptable. Being a foot fetishist is socially creepy.) But none of these titles really clicked with me. Leg Action did. I can’t really explain why, but Leg Action just thrills me every time I page through a new issue.

I’d like a subscription, but being poor, such things are out of my price range. I periodically put “Subscription to Leg Action” on my regular holiday wish list, but so far, none of my regular friends or relatives have seemed inclined to buy me porn for Christmas. (Go figure.)

There’s also something else that I’d like to get my hands on. (Or, at least one hand on. Heh.) There’s not a whole lot of the work of early-to-mid 90s porn star Flame available for download on the filesharing networks. I, pirate that I am, have gotten everything I’ve been able to find, but I know that after she got married and left the world of hardcore pornography, she hung around for awhile doing fetish films. Including some foot fetish work. Which I’ve never seen. I’d love to get copies of some of this material.

EVENTS

It’s almost hard to believe, but the next KinkFest is a mere four months away. And I really want to go. So what, you ask, is stopping me? Money. Right now a KinkFest membership is $100. Hotel room will be about that much a night for the three day, two night event. I could continue whining and say that Portland is too far to walk from here, but I’m fairly sure that I can get my friend Zorch to take me up to the event if I can get a membership and hotel room lined up somehow. I’d be willing to split a hotel room with someone, provided that it was understood that I did indeed get to sleep in a bed. (450 lbs + bad back = don’t sleep on floor). So if you can line something up for me, that’d be great, Santa. I’d appreciate it.

RIDES

I’m trying to build myself a social life. Which is kind of difficult since I don’t drive. I have places to go, I just have no way to get there. The twice-monthly Salem Munch. Monthly Asylum Dungeon parties. The occasional Darklady party. And if I start attending any of these things regularly, I’m sure that other events will be made available to me. I need rides.

Rides from here to Salem and back. Here to Portland and back. Here (or Salem, maybe) to Eugene and back. Here to the Twilight Zone and back. Mars, Wonderland, and wherever. Maybe even the occasional jaunt to the Wet Spot in Seattle. (Notice that Seattle seems farther away to me than Mars or Wonderland.) I’m not looking for somebody to give me an infinite number of rides. But I’d love it if a seemingly infinite number of people could chip in with a ride or two apiece.

PLAY PARTNERS

So far I’ve asked for bondage gear and S&M toys, books to instruct me on what to do with it, and safe sex supplies for encounters that might go in a different direction than (or simply further than) simple BDSM. Now here comes the big request: I actually need people with which to use some of this stuff. I need play partners. People willing to join me in an exploration in BDSM in any or all of it’s components in all different combinations. People up for an afternoon of age play, or foot fun, or some other kind of fetish-y indulgence. And people just interested in partaking in some casual sex with a guy like me.

NUDE MODELS

I’d also like to find some people willing to pose naked in front of my digital camera. Mainly women, but also occasionally couples. I may eventually have some artistic notion requiring single nude males, but that particular inspiration hasn’t hit me yet.

TOP TEN LIST

I asked for nude models above. That item was also on the big Top Ten list (from a few blog posts back). Now that I think about it, any/everything else on that list would also make a good Christmas present. The loss of my virginity, (more) female toes to suck on, the (gentle, careful) loss of my anal virginity, a pussy I can sink my hand into up to the wrist, someone to suck my cock (to completion), bare female flesh to write on with washable markers, a woman to play watersports games with, a strip poker game to sit in on, and a nice bare spankable female ass.

As always, thank you for your consideration.

Your friend,

Zeitgeist the Clown

* ** *** ** *

So that’s it. Well, the beginning of it, anyway. I suppose I should have said, “That’s it as of press time.” My Christmas lists always keep growing right up until Christmas Eve.

Santa’s got my address. (Santa’s got EVERYBODY’S address.) But if anyone else has a sudden desire to get me a Christmas gift (or a Birthday present, for that matter – December 23rd, y’all!), you can contact me at zeitgeist_the_clown@yahoo.com for details on where to send it. Please note that I’m not begging for presents or anything. No, what I’m doing in this, the season of giving, is offering you a wonderful gift! The gift of having that special feeling in your heart when you give somebody else a gift. That ‘somebody else’, in this case, being me.

(Is anybody falling for any of this?)

Also, this ends the recent stretch of every-other-day posting, as the library is closing for a cluster of days surrounding Thanksgiving. (Grumble grumble lousy holidays grumble.) If all goes well, I should post next on Sunday, November 30th.

Despite the grumbling in the previous paragraph, everyone have a happy Thanksgiving! (Or as my brother likes to call it, Smallpox-Infected-Blanket Day. Always so politically correct, my brother.) And those of you with the proper interest in this sort of thing, have an even happier Spanksgiving!

Who Am I (Part One)

Let’s start off with a quote from the movie “High Fidelity” –

“A while back, Dick, Barry and I agreed that what really matters is what you like, not what you are like. Books, records, films, these things matter. Call me shallow, it’s the fucking truth.”

(For the record, one of the things that I like is “High Fidelity”. I’ve got the DVD, seen it many, many times. Loved the movie, enjoyed the book.)

People with a shared interest in a particular book or movie have something to talk about. People with a shared interest in a whole bunch of particular books or movies have not only those stories to talk about, but each person can also figure out where enough of their commonality lies to suggest other stuff that the other might be into.

I’d like to strike up a romantic – and, you know, sexual – relationship with a woman who’s into (at least some of) the same stuff that I am. I’m sure that the reverse is true – anyone interested in testing out me as a potential boyfriend or sex partner would want some similarity of interest as well. Which is the point of the “Who Am I?” posts. Not who I am sexually or kink-wise (you get enough of that in all of my other posts here), but who I am regarding my non-sex interests.

There’s the train of thought that says that what you like IS what you are like. Change the wording of the classic “You are what you eat” to “You are what you consume” . . . and then broaden the meaning of the word consume. You are what you read, you are what you listen to, you are what you watch on television or in the movie theatre. (You are what you masturbate to, you are what you fantasize about.)

There’s so much to choose from. Music, books, TV, movies, food, hobbies, and so on. I’ve decided to start this series off with music.

My musical tastes are eclectic. I’m don’t really like country and western or rap. (But there are certain song-by-song exceptions to that ‘rule’.) I like rock. I like alternative (and by alternative, I mean the stuff that MTV used to call ‘alternative’ right before they would play it on their very, very mainstream channel). I’ll listen to the blues. I’m not a huge fan of classical, but there is some of it that I do indeed groove on. People tell me, based on my music collection, that I should be listening to more ska. I don’t know. My selections are from all over the board.

I was raised on country and western. Which is to say that musically, I was raised in a sort of cultural prison. Country and western was the only music that Dad would allow in the house.

The first acceptable break from country and western (this when I was about 10 years old or so) was Neil Diamond. My cousin was heavily into Neil Diamond at the time. (This has been the only beneficial contribution to my life that the otherwise worthless sack of shit has made to date.) And so Neil Diamond albums were being played as background music during a family function at my aunt and uncle’s house one day. And I absolutely loved it. I asked Mom, Mom asked Dad, Dad said he didn’t mind, and it wasn’t long before I was in possession of a Neil Diamond Greatest Hits album. And it wasn’t too much longer before I had a stack of Neil Diamond albums filed next to my assorted country and western selections.

Eventually, something else happened that opened a little peephole into the world of non-country and western music for me. That something was called Color Sounds.

Color Sounds played music videos. The same stuff that they were playing on music videos, but with subtitles, some of the words highlighted in various colors. It was a PBS thing in the mid-80s, and intended as an aid to learning English. Not having cable at the time, it was also my first exposure to music videos.

What I always saw was just a single video (to keep the station from broadcasting dead air in between the 25 minute long episode of Doctor Who and the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour). When I checked Wikipedia the other day I discovered that it was an actual program – half-hour for TV broadcast and a special 15 minute version for in-classroom play. (Weird. I never knew.)

Apparently each ‘episode’ version of Color Sounds had a theme (noun, verb, adjective, etc.), and those words were highlighted in red. It also, according to Wikipedia, added on-screen notes correcting the spelling/pronunciation mistakes and bad/questionable grammar of the song lyrics.

Anyway, whereas Color Sounds opened up a peephole in the door that was OTHER MUSIC, that Christmas I was given the equivalent of a key to that door. It was a fairly recent development in technology (God, I feel old) called a Walkman. Little cassette player with headphones. A way of listening to music without bothering Dad with ‘noise’ that offended his one-note musical taste. The walkman was a wrapped gift found beneath the tree. The Christmas stocking held a tape: Cyndi Lauper’s “She’s So Unusual”.

My musical tastes continued a very slow evolution until I got into high school. People would lend me tapes of artists whose videos I’d liked on Color Sounds. I started listening to a little non-country radio when Dad wasn’t around. Borrowing more tapes. In high school I got a job, and start buying tapes. Then somebody invented something called the compact disc. (Still feel old.) Eventually Santa brought me a CD player, and I switched from buying tapes to buying CDs. (That’s also when I discovered music clubs like Columbia House and BMG.)

I’ve revealed what some people would consider to be embarrassing pieces of information about my sex(less) life in the pages of this blog. So here’s an embarrassing piece of information about my musical history: I really, really liked ultra-bubble-gum-pop, famous-for-concerts-in-malls, teen sensation Tiffany. One of the first two CDs I ever owned was a Tiffany CD.

My senior year in high school, friends started having me listen to bands like Aerosmith and Guns-n-Roses. The stuff that everybody else was listening to. That’s about when I met Casper (not his real name). Casper and I quickly became good friends, and he did something that mutated my brain and changed my life forever. Casper turned me on to the Beatles. I quickly copied Casper’s library of Beatles tapes (something like 17 of them).

Senior year in high school was when I got sick. Spent a lot of time in bed, plugged into a multiple generation copy of the White Album, taped from a record where the needle jumped in the middle of ‘Rocky Raccoon’. (Even after years of White Album on CD, ‘Rocky Raccoon’ doesn’t sound right without that little skip in the middle.)

In addition to being at the beginning stages of (a currently 20 year long and counting) chronic illness, my parents also sort of kicked me out of the house. Not really. But sort of. We lived next door to my Grandmother, who wasn’t using the upstairs of her house for anything but storage. And my young twin siblings were at that stage where they could no longer share a single bedroom. So I got moved next door, and my sister took over my old room.

My grandmother was a pro-wrestling junkie. She watched WWF Superstars on Saturday mornings, and Portland Wrestling on Saturday nights. (So did I, for that matter. But grandma believed it was all real. Unplanned, and a real sport. She’d scream at the television set when the bad guys pulled crap. It was sometimes more fun to watch her than it was to watch the actual wrestling itself.) Anyway, one day we were talking about wrestling and I mentioned one of the other wrestling organizations I’d heard about that was on cable. My grandmother looked at me, stunned. “They have wrestling on cable?”

Two weeks later, we had cable. Grandma had her wrestling. I had MTV.

Strangely, the next big adjustment to my musical tastes didn’t come from MTV, but – as odd as this sounds – an episode of Tiny Toon Adventures. They did an MTV parody episode, and two of the ‘music videos’ they played were from songs by They Might Be Giants. “Who the fuck,” I wondered, “are ‘They Might Be Giants’? And why do those two songs compel me to seek out more? More! More!”

The next time I was offered a ride into Salem I found a They Might Be Giants CD (“Flood”) in a music store’s Alternative section. It had both of the songs from Tiny Toons, along with 17 other tracks, most of which were as good if not better. “Flood” contains my favorite lyric of all time, in a song titled ‘Dead’: “Now it’s over, I’m dead, and I haven’t done anything that I want; or, I’m still alive, and there’s nothing I want to do.”

After sharing my discovery with Casper, between the two of us we quickly assembled the entire TMBG catalog. All four albums of it. (Three studio albums and a b-sides compilation.)

Then I started asking myself, “What is this ‘Alternative’ section that TMBG disks and tapes are housed in? What else is in there?”

I asked this question of MTV, and MTV showed me videos Sundays at midnight, during their two-hour long alternative showcase, cleverly titled “120 Minutes”. This made Casper and I start buying more tapes and CDs.

I seem to recall a little band called Nirvana having a video or two that strayed outside the boundaries of MTV’s ‘alternative’ section. Other bands followed.

Here’s a weird way to go about things: Casper and I discovered a band called the Breeders, fronted by Kim Deal. Then we discovered Frank Black, formerly known as Black Francis. Then, several years later, we finally sought out the Pixies – the seminal alternative band that brought Black Francis and Kim Deal (along with David Lovering and Joey Santiago) into the musical scene long prior to the existence of the Breeders or Frank Black’s solo career.

We’d find something we’d like, and we’d scout around to see what else we could find in the same genre. We both dug Dr. John, and the world music influences on Paul Simon’s “Graceland” and “Rhythm of the Saints” albums. So we looked into world music. Casper thought it was okay, but nothing to write home about. I thought it was missing something. (Probably Paul Simon.)

I was a big David Letterman fan, back in the day. And every time that Warren Zevon would fill in for Paul Shaffer, I’d say to myself, “I should really pick up some of his stuff – it seems like I’d really enjoy it.” I didn’t actually follow through with this instinct until I’d heard that Mr. Zevon had been diagnosed with inoperable cancer and given mere months to live.

I stopped listening to the radio in the early 90s. I had enough CDs that I knew I had a solid stream of music I knew that I liked vs. radio’s few songs I might like interspersed among potentially crappy songs and tons of commercials. Then MTV discovered reality television, and quit playing music videos. So I don’t hear new music anymore. My musical tastes actually stop back about the mid-90s. I still accumulate new work by artists I’m already into, but it’s become hard for me to get into newer stuff. I think that the OCD-addled part of my brain looked at my (vast) music collection and decided, “Okay, this is the music I listen to. This and only this.”

Anyway . . .

Last time I checked my Livejournal friends’ page, I noticed that there was a Top 10 Desert Island Albums meme going around. I don’t think that I could ever pick a definitive list that would last more than a day without revision.

But today, if forced to choose, my top ten desert island picks would be (in alphabetical order by artist) . . .

A.) Aerosmith “Pump”
B.) The Beatles “White Album” [possibly a cheat, being a 2-disc set]
B.) Frank Black “Dog in the Sand”
C.) Leonard Cohen “I’m Your Man”
C.) Counting Crows “August and Everything After”
H.) Hole “Live Through This”
P.) Liz Phair “Exile in Guyville”
S.) Paul Simon “Graceland”
T.) They Might Be Giants “Flood”
Z.) Some kind of Warren Zevon “Greatest Hits” or “Best Of” Compilation

A previous meme (several years ago) had asked me who was on my current playlist. I opened up a new word processor document and copied the names down, rearranged them in alphabetical order, and posted them. At the time, it was a large playlist, and apparently held songs by Aerosmith, the Amps, Adam Ant, the Bangles, the Beastie Boys, the Beatles, Belly, the Blues Brothers Band, the Breeders, Beck, Chuck Berry, Harry Belefonte, Pat Benetar, Frank Black, Edie Brickell, Jimmy Buffet, David Byrne, Counting Crows, Crash Test Dummies, Credence Clearwater Revival, Johnny Cash, Leonard Cohen, Phil Collins, Neil Diamond, Dr. John, Everclear, Eminem, the Fabulous Thunderbirds, Garbage, Genesis, Guns N Roses, Hole, John Lee Hooker, Johnny Horton, Imperial Teen, Billy Idol, Billy Joel, Kid Rock, B. B. King, the Lemonheads, Cyndi Lauper, Huey Lewis, The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Mono Puff, Muddy Waters, Nirvana, Oingo Boingo, the Pixies, the Police, the Presidents of the United States of America, the Pretenders, Primus, Tom Petty. Liz Phair, Queen, the Refreshments, REM, Shakespear’s Sister, Simon and Garfunkel, Soul Asylum, the Stone Roses, Sweetwater, Paul Simon, Tatu, They Might Be Giants, George Thorogood, U2, Urge Overkill, the Violent Femmes, Suzanne Vega, Ween, Hank Williams Jr., XTC, Weird Al Yankovic, ZZTop, Warren Zevon, 10000 Maniacs, 2nu, and 4 Non Blondes.

Like I said, my tastes are eclectic.

As I sit here writing this, I’m listening to Christmas music. Have been for awhile now. And if the usual pattern holds true – with the exception of short bursts of other stuff here and there – I’ll listen exclusively to Christmas music until about mid-January or so.

Ah, Christmas music. Mom was big on Christmas music. From the moment we got home from Thanksgiving dinner at my Aunt’s house until January 6th (or a little after), the Christmas music played. Most of my friends these days can’t stand the stuff. Too many people working jobs where it plays as muzak for the entirety of their shift for way too many weeks. But me? I can’t get enough of it.

Now, while I do enjoy the traditional classics, the majority of the Christmas music that I listen to nowadays is the more alternative stuff. New Christmas songs performed by specific artists, along with some of the more ‘novelty’ songs of the past. Mel Blanc singing “The Hat I Got For Christmas Is Too Beeg” in a Speedy Gonzalez style Mexican accent. Selections from the Christmas Albums from artists like The Refreshments, Squirrel Nut Zippers, and Harry Connick Jr. The stuff that you don’t hear on the in-store muzak tracks.

I’ve got three Christmas playlists on my computer. The big one clocks in at nearly 17 hours, and contains MP3s ripped from all my Christmas CDs, along with other miscellaneous stuff downloaded from here and there. The small one is pretty much just the ‘good’ stuff. Non-traditional songs you only ever hear performed by the artist who wrote them, stuff by the aforementioned Mel Blanc, the Refreshments, Squirrel Nut Zippers, Harry Connick Jr., along with the Pretenders, Cyndi Lauper, REM, Chris Issak, Weird Al Yankovic, the Brian Setzer Orchestra, and They Might Be Giants. That’s the playlist that my Christmas music hating friends can tolerate. No Jingle Bells, no Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, no White Christmas. Most of the people I know will even sing along to “The Hat I Got For Christmas is Too Beeg”.

The mid-sized Christmas playlist contains the entirety of the small one, along with a selection of traditional Christmas music for me. By ‘my’ artists if I can get them (Cyndi Lauper, Neil Diamond, etc.), but by the generic whomever if that’s all that’s available to me. That’s the one that gets the most play.

This isn’t something that I even realized until I started writing this post, but I’m starting to wonder if my love of Christmas music doesn’t stem in part from the fact that it was always a nearly month and a half long break from Dad’s country and western mandate. Yee-haw became ho-ho-ho. Parole from cultural prison.

Anyway, that’s who I am – more or less – musically. Any questions?

-sexual and -curious

I like words. Words are fun. Prefixes, suffixes, root words. Synonyms, antonyms, homonyms. Word games, etymology, portmanteaus, palindromes, and so on and so forth.

Sometimes I like to play semantic games. (That’s s-e-m-A-n-t-i-c. Not s-e-m-E-n-blah-blah-blah. I probably should have found a really bad pun or a clever semen joke to put here, but I couldn’t think of one. Sorry.)

Today I’ll be talking about the suffixes –sexual and –curious. –sexual as in heterosexual, homosexual, and bisexual. –curious as in bi-curious. [Yes, I know that –sexual isn’t a suffix. Hetero-, homo-, and bi- are prefixes. But I’ll be treating –sexual as if it were a suffix. I can do that, because I’m playing with words. Plus, it’s my blog. I can do whatever I want. (Except, apparently, get laid.)] These suffixes have a lot of potential, but aren’t used as often as I think that they could (or should) be. Let’s take a look . . .

First there was heterosexual and homosexual. One liked the opposite sex, one liked the same sex. Then there came bisexual. Bisexual took the middle ground, liking both the opposite sex AND the same sex. That’s all fine, and makes good linguistic sense, and I have no real problems with it.

Then along comes bi-curious. Bi-curious is another fine, upstanding word, and I have no problems with it, either. Until it first went up for sale in the word store and people started taking it home and using it. (Or however it is that words end up in our day-to-day vocabulary.) I’m not going to say that people misuse the word, but I can’t honestly say that I think they use it as correctly as they should.

Bi-curious. You’re curious about being bisexual. Curious about liking both sexes. That’s what it means. But people only ever seem to use one of the several possible examples of ‘bi-curious’ that the definition offers.

Normally, people who label themselves as bi-curious are basically heterosexual people who are curious about homosexual sex. Straight guys fantasizing about cock. Straight women dreaming about participating in a little girl-on-girl action.

It seems to me that an equally viable definition of bi-curious would be homosexual people who are curious about heterosexual sex. Gays wondering what it would be like to play with tits and pussy. Lesbians with the occasional fantasies about cock. I’ve never heard bi-curious used in this way, but I have to assume that it is.

I’m bi-curious. But I actually qualify my particular form of bi-curiosity as yet a third definition of the term. Similar to the standard form, I consider myself primarily heterosexual with an interest in homosexual sex. But the difference in my case is that in addition to not yet having confirmed or denied my partial homosexuality, I also have yet to confirm (or deny, I suppose) my base heterosexuality. I haven’t had the straight sex that is the baseline from which most straight-leaning bi-curious people emerge.

When the event of my Loss of Virginity finally rolls around, it’s technically possible that at the moment of truth I’m going to slide my erect penis into that (seemingly mythical at this point) warm wet vagina . . . and then immediately pull out again, screaming, “Ew! Gross! Yucky!” Then run off and become a sexual hermit or something, having discovered that sex is disgusting. (I very much doubt this, but under the philosophy of ‘anything is possible’ I acknowledge that there’s at least a slim chance that it could happen.) So, as a bi-curious virgin, I really haven’t yet qualified anything about my sexuality.

(Actually, I know enough about myself to know that I’m either heterosexual (I like girls) or bisexual (I might like guys, but not as much as girls). And if I’m bisexual, I’d be surprised if the ‘gay half’ was actually anywhere near as high as 50%. But I’m playing semantic games and juggling semi-abstract concepts here, so it’s just easier to pretend that I have equal interest in both cock and pussy for the purposes of this post.)

I could make the argument (especially if I were in a particularly weird righteous and/or indignant mood) that my form of bi-curiosity is the truest or purest form of bi-curiosity. Bi-curious. Curious about both. Not ‘confirmed in one aspect and therefore only curious about the one remaining aspect’. Nope. Curious about both.

If you wanted to be accurate (and somewhat label happy), you could further differentiate the various forms of bi-curious as: Bi-curious (Hetero-Based Homo-Curious), Bi-curious (Homo-based Hetero-Curious), and True Bi-curious.

(Wow . . . if bisexuality is a neutral state between heterosexuality and homosexuality, then you could state True Bi as True Neutral. Now I want to regraph sexual preferences over the Dungeons and Dragons alignment chart. I won’t, but mainly because I’d have to assign values like good/evil or lawful/chaotic to heterosexual and homosexual, and I don’t like the social stigma implied in placing evil or chaotic over one of the two sexual choices.. But still . . . ‘True Bi-curious’ sounds like something that I should have a d20 in my hand when I say.)

Now here’s where my thought process goes all curveball on me. Let’s say that I had no interest in man-on-man sex whatsoever. Pretend that all of my interests and fantasies were 100% heterosexual. If a sexually active hetero-based and homo-curious person is labeled bi-curious instead of bisexual because they haven’t confirmed their bisexuality (by having the actual homosexual sex necessary as a qualifier), then could a 100% heterosexually interested version of me truly be called heterosexual if I haven’t yet “done the deed” and confirmed my heterosexual status? No. Since I’m still a virgin, my sexual preference would have to be listed as hetero-curious. (Or straight-curious. Bi- is pretty much universal, whether used between hetero- and homo- or between straight and gay/lesbian.)

[And does it seem right to you that even in hypothetical situations, I’m still a virgin?]

And if so, then from there, the terminology just runs wild. Young homosexual virgins become labeled homo-curious or gay-curious/lesbian-curious.

In fact, virgins in general, regardless of presumed sexual orientation, could call themselves sex-curious. (Sexually-active amnesia patients who don’t remember being pre-sexual could be virgin-curious . . . okay, that’s probably too weird of an example to actually happen. Never mind.)

You could actually go overboard on the use of –curious and apply it to every sexual act of interest you haven’t yet managed to accomplish. Like all of those guys who are anal-curious, but whose girlfriends/wives refuse to take it up the ass to accommodate them.

I’ve called myself a foot fetishist for years. But as far as getting off on toe-sucking goes, I could technically be said to have simply been fetish-curious up until the night of Darklady’s Polyween Party. NOW I’m a fetishist. (Fetish-sexual?) (And looking for more pretty bare suckable female toes, if anyone’s interested in providing same.)

From what I can tell, a lot of BDSM ‘newbies’ are simply BDSM-curious. It looks like it might be good. But they really aren’t sure. Attending a play party or two gives them confirmation or denial, and then they’ve either tried it and gone back to vanilla, or are now eager new members of the lifestyle.

Okay. Those are (the majority of) my thoughts on –curious. Now what about –sexual? Like I stated at the beginning of this post, the classics are heterosexual, homosexual, and bisexual. I didn’t mention transsexual, which instead of liking both sexes is being both sexes. Or transitioning between sexes. Or having already successfully transitioned between sexes.

Are there others?

Of course, there’s always the one-liner, “I’m a trisexual . . . I’ll try anything”. That one doesn’t count, as it’s a joke. (Sure, jokes are wordplay, but not the same kind I’m going for here.)

Science-fiction brings us the term omnisexual. Captain Jack Harkness (from “Doctor Who” and “Torchwood”) is credited as being omnisexual. Captain Jack will pretty much fuck anything or anybody: male, female, human, alien, robot, etc. Omnisexual counts because it’s a viable concept, even if only a science-fiction one. It could also count as a modern-day attitude. Do you know someone who only stopped at bisexuality because of the lack of a convenient third sex? Yeah. That’s omnisexuality.

Although now that I think about it . . . if you take the traditional gender list of male and female and go ahead and add in hermaphrodite, she-male (tits and a dick), reverse she-male (no tits and a pussy), and any other transsexual option, I suppose that an attraction to each and every one of the gender classes on that list would qualify you as omnisexual, wouldn’t it?

If you’re only interested in masturbation – or sex with self – could you be considered a suisexual?

I’ve heard the term pre-sexual humans applied to little kids. (Which, in this day and age, isn’t always an accurate description, as sad a commentary as that is on society.) I’ve never heard the term post-sexual humans, but then since the invention of Viagra, why would I? But I think that both presexual and postsexual deserve usage on the list.

Asexual. (Not the biological term, but the characteristics of lacking in desire for sex. I actually knew a guy once who was more-or-less asexual. Sure, when I was much younger I knew people who didn’t see what the big deal about sex was, and were thus a-curious. But this guy started out hetero-curious, had sex several times and decided, “Nope. Not for me.”)

Morphosexual. (Don’t worry if you’ve never heard the term before, it was coined during a conversation I had long ago about desire and gender.) Morphosexuals would be attracted to transsexuals. A morphosexual sees a transsexual as someone who was so incredibly secure in a sexuality/gender they didn’t currently possess that they went through Hell and high water to become that. Which is appealing to morphosexuals. Appealing, arousing, sexy. Very sexy. (And if morphosexuality isn’t a big fetish now, I’m sure that it will be in the future.)

Yeah, morphosexual probably sounds like it should mean that you’re attracted to shapeshifters. It also sounds too close to anthropomorphosexual, which would be people in fursuits that only have sex with other people in fursuits. (Or, a hundred years from now, people with spliced animal DNA who only have sex with other people with spliced animal DNA.) ‘Morphosexual’ was only ever meant as a placeholder word. I was never able to come up with anything better. (Never really tried all that hard.)

And yes, the sexual preference morphosexuality could also just as easily be listed as the fetish morphophilia. (In fact, I even referred to it as a fetish paragraph before last myself.) I could go either way on it’s classification. Which might make me a bi-classificationist. (I don’t know.)

There are (at least) several desires that I could argue should be moved from the ‘fetish’ category to the ‘sexual preference’ one. Changing the official suffix from –philiac to –sexual.

But that’s a topic for another post. (Probably entitled “–philia”.)

Internet Status Update - A Turn for the Worse

My brother and sister-in-law have been looking for a new place to live for awhile now. Someplace cheaper than the place where they’ve been living. Last month they found a place that was not only more expensive, but also bigger than they needed . . . and the wheels in their heads started turning.

My sister and future brother-in-law, on the other hand, haven’t exactly been looking for a new place to live, but their money has been tight, and if something along the lines of a more affordable housing situation was presented to them, they’d certainly consider it.

So my brother shows up at my sister’s place with his grand plan: “Hey, you and your fiancé should move into a house with me and my wife!”

My sister’s first reaction was a very sarcastic, “Yeah, right. That’ll happen.” But the more she and her fiancé thought about it and talked it over (and the more my brother hung around them, pointing out all the merits of his plan to them), the more plausible it seemed to them. Until finally my brother and his wife won them over, and they agreed to the plan.

So, they applied to become the house’s next rental occupants. And got it. Now they’re moving. Today, as a matter of fact. The first U-Haul load of boxes made it’s run when the clock struck midnight.

They’re moving from Salem to a place halfway between Salem and Silverton, out in the midst of nowhere. Splitting rent and utilities on the one place is costing them each less than their individual dwellings were costing them previously, so this is a great move for them. I’m happy for them. Really. I am.

However . . .

I’m sad and depressed for me. Because as great a move as this is for them, it royally sucks for me. Among the various downsides are the fact that their new place will have no ‘extra room’ that can be kept animal hair free for me to sleep in, meaning no more spending the night at my sister’s (now my brother and sister’s) place. Plus, on the occasions that I manage to pull off a daytime visit, I’m no longer going to be mere walking distance from Border’s, Bi-Mart, Jack-in-the-Box, and other useful locations. No more being able to get a ride to my sister’s place in order to be able to meet people in Salem for potentially erotic purposes. (Not that it’s a scenario that’s ever happened, but it was nice to know that the option was available to me in case that kind of miracle were to ever take place.)

But those aren’t the main problems. No, the main problem is the internet.

My sister is moving from an apartment with high-speed internet to a house where the telecommunication tools consist of a tin can connected to a string that disappears off into the distance.

Up until now, my internet access has been the library and occasional trips to my sister’s apartment. Guess what? Now it’s down to just the library. Using my sister’s internet was important because it allowed me the opportunity to visit all of the sites that triggered the library’s pornography filter. There are so many blogs and general information sites that I simply can’t access there because of sexual content. (As well as actual erotica/pornography sites that I don’t even try for.)

Someone just pointed me toward a link to a couple of sites that apparently do nothing but host links to either sex or BDSM blogs. These sites, of course, trigger the porn filter. I want to get Time Delay listed there. But sadly, some contingent of librarians has placed a big block of censorship smugly between us.

My normal tactic would be to just wait until my next visit to my sister’s internet connection, but right now, that looks to be a long wait. A very, very, very long wait.

My siblings et al are hoping to get some kind of internet before the end of the year, but everything available to them out there is of the low-speed variety. Not just average slow, but speed determined by a cartoon turtle on a treadmill slow.

The other option in their area is satellite internet. And satellite internet apparently only gives you X amount of usage per month. (It’s either a time-online amount or a bits-uploaded-or-downloaded amount, I forget which.) Both my brother and future brother-in-law go through internet like a racing heart goes through blood. They’d use up a month’s internet allotment inside a week, easily. So, satellite isn’t really a viable option for them. Which leaves them with the turtlenet.

I could almost cope with not being able to use their internet for access to sites that were otherwise blocked to me, if it weren’t for the other little internet matter. With the loss of their high-speed internet, I’ve also lost my Download Monkey!

Shortly after my internet access went away, I recruited my sister’s fiancé (at the time, merely her boyfriend) as my official Download Monkey. I happen to live in what is somewhere between a poor TV reception area and an actual reception dead zone. I don’t know if it’s a naturally occurring phenomenon, or some kind of conspiracy. I envision myself eventually discovering the truth and writing an expose entitled “How the Grinch Stole My Television Reception”. (You’re a mean one, Mr. Grinch!) So any television programs that I watch either have to wait until they’re released on DVD and available through NetFlix, or . . . I have my Download Monkey obtain for me via the BitTorrent peer-to-peer network.

The position of Download Monkey entails other tasks as well. He’s not just television retrieval. I’m certainly not about to tell you that I have him downloading things like comic books and occasionally music, because that’s getting into both legal and ethical gray areas. And I’m not going to imply that he downloads porn for me, although I will say that I usually have plenty of stuff to masturbate to. (Draw your own conclusions.)

In all honesty, I don’t have him downloading movies or anything off of the pay-cable channels like Showtime or HBO. Partly out of a fear of getting stomped by the Anti-Piracy/Anti-Downloading Boot of the MPAA, and partly out of an actual ethical dilemma over the fact that downloading things like ‘The Sopranos’ and ‘Entourage’ kinda does cheat the pay-cable channels out of revenue. Whereas since programs like ‘House’ and ‘My Name Is Earl’ are transmitted over the open airwaves, they should be free game for download.

But now I appear to be download-less. Even once they get internet hooked up, low-speed makes downloading unfeasible.

(This is another reason why I need a larger social circle. I have no other Download Monkey candidates. Zorch used to pitch in before he started school, but he’s currently living in the dorms, where they’ve blocked peer-to-peer capability. I’m beginning to wonder if the Grinch wasn’t behind that little development as well. Damn you, Grinch!)

So, to summarize the revised internet situation . . . I still have no internet access of my own here where I live. I now have roughly half the outside internet access I had before. And it’s the G to PG rated half. No erotica, no porn, and not a lot of the questionable content, either. No downloads. No one stepping in to fill the gap left by my Download Monkey.

Today is a very sad day for Zeitgeist the Clown.

Sigh.

The Top Ten List

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Writer's Block

‘Writing’ is a broad category. There’s a difference between doing technical writing and writing poetry. A difference between blogging and writing a novel. A difference between journalism and writing fortunes for fortune cookies. Being able to write a short story doesn’t mean that you’re qualified to write an instruction manual for a complex piece of machinery. Or vice-versa.

A lot of writers have multiple writing skill sets. Some people can write fiction and poetry. Some people can do technical writing and journalism. Some people can write every damn thing in every damn format, and those people are just plain show-offs.

Okay, I admit it. I used to be something of a show-off myself. I never did any technical writing, my journalism was all high-school journalism, and my poetry was mostly free-verse stuff. I haven’t had anything published or produced in the mainstream, but I’ve written fiction, non-fiction, poetry, a comic book script, essays, experimental fiction pieces, a novel, and I’ve co-written a television script. I’ve done zines, I’ve done columns, I’ve done blogs.

The reason that I’m here on Earth is to write novels. As near as I can tell, that’s my purpose in life. Write, write, write.

And that being my purpose was all fine and good right up until 1997. That’s when the writer’s block hit.

I have to stop at this point to define writer’s block. The affliction that I suffer from is different than the problem people usually have when they say that they have writer’s block. And it’s always made more sense to me that what I have is actually writer’s block, and what everybody else has is actually something else. So, I’ve arbitrarily decided that that’s how it is.

The majority of people who claim to have writer’s block have the following difficulty: They can’t think of anything to write. They can’t come up with an idea. They’re all ready to go, but there isn’t any inspiration to build a story. That is NOT writer’s block. That is storyteller’s block. The problem isn’t with their writing skills, it’s with their storytelling stills. Instead of not being able to write they simply don’t have a story to tell.

What I have is writer’s block. I’ve got a story to tell. (Stories to tell. At this point, I’ve probably got more stories to tell than I ever possibly could.) But I’m not able to write them. My writing skills are blocked off.

And this is the part that most of the people around me have a difficult (usually impossible) time trying to understand. My writer’s block has pretty much just affected my fiction writing skills. I can’t write stories. Can’t write novels.

I’ve had friends and family during the past ten years point to whatever zine or blog project I had going at the time and tell me, “What do you mean, you have writer’s block? No you don’t. You’re writing this right now, aren’t you? Don’t be stupid.”

Then I explain that ‘writing’ is an umbrella term that covers a variety of skill subsets, and they either stare blankly at me, or correct me. “No it isn’t. You’re wrong. If you can write zines/blogs, then you can write a novel. Quit complaining and get to work.”

What an understanding support system I have.

Writer’s block. Fiction writer’s block, more specifically. Want to write, but can’t. I can create characters and spin plotlines. I can figure out what happens. I can take notes. I can even open a new word processor document and set my fingers on the keyboard’s home row. But that’s about it. For me, the next step is to stare at the blank screen until blood pours out my eyes and ears.

I suppose that I wouldn’t mind it quite so much if I had storyteller’s block to go along with it. But I don’t. I still come up with new stories to tell. In fact, I come up with stories I want to write at a greater rate now than I did before the writer’s block started.

Once the writer’s block was firmly in place, the idea floodgates opened up. I was getting what seemed to be a solid new idea for a project I wanted to tackle every week or so. A new novel here. A movie idea there. Serialized fiction pieces (usually intended for self-publication). Scripts for a new comic book series. Every damn thing you can imagine. Unwritten (and currently unwritable) story ideas were piling up in the back of my head like cordwood. I’m sitting on what seems like an infinite project list, and no accessible writing skills with which to tackle any of them.

I’ve tried everything to bypass the writer’s block. I’ve tried to break through, push through, sneak around, hop over, tunnel under, etc. Nothing works. I’ve read material on writer’s block and tried to utilize the advice therein. I’ve read books on the creative process. No success.

Five or six years into life with writer’s block, I turned my attempts at writing toward writing erotica. I’d written a little bit of erotica in the past. Nothing major, mainly just experiments with stroke material. But I had recently been reading lots of poorly-written porn stories on the internet – just stuff to masturbate to – and I thought that maybe it would be an easier way to crack the writer’s block than my usual stuff.

For the most part, that didn’t work either. What it did do, however, was switch the bulk of the idea flow from mainstream-type ideas to porn concepts. I still get ideas for new non-sex based novels about once a month or so, but now the majority of my new story ideas are for erotic stories.

Being a big fan of the type of mythos settings like the Marvel and DC universes (for the fact that characters from one set of stories can interact with characters from another set of stories, not for the flying people in tights and capes), the majority of my erotic stories take place in the same fictional universe. Characters from stories set in Washington could drive down to California and fuck characters from stories I’ve plotted that are set down there if they wanted to. Heck, I’ve got stories planned in which some of them do just that. I’ve taken to calling this little interconnectivity framework the ‘Zeitverse’.

Yes, my brain took what was intended to be just a bunch of one-off stroke stories, and turned it into a complete fictional universe. (Stupid brain.) A complex, mostly unwritten fictional mythos. Yeah, I used the word mostly.

Since every rule seems to have it’s exception . . . A couple of years ago I spent several months doing prepwork on what was intended to be a piece of serialized erotic fiction entitled “The Sex Lives of Edwin Dauly”. The project was another one of my experimental treatments for writer’s block. It was simply a case of ‘well, nothing else has worked, so why not try this? And why not try it on this particular project?’

As I said, several months worth of prepwork went into this thing. I plotted out a month in the life of my main character. Created his supporting cast. Figured out the needed locations where stuff would take place. Sketched out backstories and histories. All the usual stuff.

Then I focused on the opening chapter, which took place at a New Year’s sex party. I figured out everything that happened in my head. I went over it again and again. I spent over a month repeating it back to myself, retelling the story. It was mid-October by this point, and I suddenly realized that I was just a couple of weeks away from National Novel Writing Month.

So I redoubled my efforts, tightened my focus, and spent all my time concentrating on being able to tell the story of that first chapter in my head. Then on November 1st I tried writing. I spent the whole day writing and deleting crap after crap. Finally, sometime in the middle of the night, I had a beginning that I thought I could live with. I collapsed into bed and picked it up the next day.

Over the period of those first few days, I slowly began putting together something that I thought looked remarkably like a work of fiction. I finished the first chapter and moved onto the second. The second had been outlined, but not beaten to death in my head like the first one had. But I was able to work my way through it and move on to the third.

At this point, the problem was that I couldn’t tell whether what I had churned out thus far had any merit whatsoever. It had been so long since I’d actually been able to write anything that I honestly couldn’t judge my own work anymore. I needed feedback. I needed some kind of quality control.

All of my traditional test readers from back in the day had either broken contact and moved away, or were dead (in one notable case were both dead AND my mom – and even if she hadn’t been the former, being the latter would still have kept me from handing over a stack of porn I’d written for her opinion).

I tried recruiting members of my current social circle as test readers, but that went nowhere fast. I handed out a bunch of copies for perusal. Most potential readers were either legitimately busy or couldn’t be bothered. My sister refuses to read anything I write that has sex in it, as she does not want the concepts of ‘me’ and ‘sex’ connected in any way, shape, or form in her fragile little brain. One guy actually did read it, but informed me that he sucked at giving feedback. He liked it, though. (“I liked it, though” being the sole feedback I got from him.) And he wanted more once I had more written. The only person who gave me useful feedback gave it to me on the first segment I gave her, but never got around to reading the next pieces I sent.

[Interestingly, one of the things that she pointed out to me about that first chapter was that – after spending months going over and over what would go on so that telling and retelling the story was second nature to me, I’d actually managed to forget to slip in minor little things like description and characterization. Or any kind of plot beyond just people doing what people do at a sex party.]

I ended up writing what was a surprisingly large chunk of text for not having been able to write in so very, very long. (More than NaNoWriMo’s requisite 50,000 words.) And then the plot problems began to surface. That, coupled with my inability to tell if what I was writing was decent, left me suddenly no longer able to write it.

Haven’t written a thing since. Haven’t been able to.

I’ve tried using the same process that created the initial chunk of “The Sex Lives of Edwin Dauly” for two other projects. One was a non-sex based sci-fi story, the other was another erotica piece. Neither one worked.

I’m still convinced that I’m going to have an easier time writing erotica/pornography than I will writing the more mainstream type stuff. Which is why the hard drive crash a month or so ago was such a tragedy. It wiped out my notes file.

My erotica notes system works like this: When I get a new idea for an erotica story, I type it into a (currently gigantic) word processor file. Working title (if I have one) and a short synopsis (anywhere from one line to a short paragraph).

Then, about once a month or so, I take all of the new story ideas and start new files for them. One word processor document per story idea. It’s in these individual documents that the ideas actually get developed. Sometimes they stay one line or one paragraph. Sometimes they end up being twenty or more pages of notes.

As I spent the weeks post crash trying to retrieve files, I discovered that the folder containing the individual notes files for each story idea was corrupted beyond retrieval. Which puts me back to July of 2007 and the previous back-up for any of that data. I was able to retrieve the 108 page document containing the short synopsizes of all those stories (over 1300 of them), so not all of the core concepts were lost, just the development I put into them.

I honestly can’t decide whether to try and rebuild my notes or just abandon the stories and move on to something else. Even if my writing skills were to come back today, between the porn stories and the other non-sex stuff, I wouldn’t be able to write everything on the big project list if I lived to be 114. So I don’t know what I’m doing yet.

Most of what is on the massive list of erotic story concepts is intended to be either short stories or serialized pieces. There are a few things that could easily be turned into novels with the right preparation, but the list is mainly just the seeds for shorter pieces.

I’d like to start writing BDSM and fetish novels. Projects that have very explicit sex scenes and elaborate descriptions of kink scenarios . . . but also have the kind of overall plotlines that you find in what the mainstream likes to label ‘literature’. That’s the current goal.

We’re approaching the end of the year. And once again I find myself saying, “Well, looks like this year was another bust. But next year – next year I’ll start writing again. Next year is the year that it all turns around for me.”

I always say this. I always mean it. Deep down, I don’t think I ever really believe it. Not anymore. But this time . . . I don’t know. This time I feel weirdly optimistic about things. Like maybe 2009 really is the year it all turns around for me, and I start writing again.

Who knows? Maybe if I can’t impress (and seduce) women with the blog, I’ll be able to do it with a novel or two.