Shibari Ill be your Daddy but not your ...'s blog: "Musings from the Dungeon"

You ever consider really who you are? I have. Me I mean. I don't like it much. I don't like it a lot. I go back a long way. Doing this and that. Peeking at this and that. Touching this and that. But never having enough nerve to really express myself. Well now I have the nerve. But no one cares. I care. I went to see a prist. That was a thrill. Turns out he's worse than I could have ever been. I have a lesbian friend I can talk to but she is with her out of town lover this week so who to talk to is rather limited. I sat out in the patio this morning and watch the sun come up over the trees and roofs. It was beautiful. The birds are feeding in the feeds I have set out. I love to watch the birds. The squirrel that runs along the cable company's line is cool. I have three dried corncobs set out on fence posts. He'll have a lot to store up for the winter.

Last Saturday and Sunder were pretty well filled with cutting ivy off the back fence, mowing the yard, and trimming shrubs. My tomatoes are through putting on now so I have cut them back to see if I can entice a couple of new blooms. Early Saturday, while doing some things with the RV Trailer, I added so chemicals to the septic storage tank. So late Sunday afternoon, I decided to tow it down to the lake. There is a dumping station there and I thought it would be a good time to do just that. Not wanting to leave the wife home alone with an opportunity to fall off the wagon, I invited her along. The lake was crowed as one might expect, but after dumping, I pulled around a couple of the camping areas. The one strictly for RV's was of course full, but the other one, which allows campers of any type while pretty full had one RV space open right next to the water. I told the wife, "Hey, you want to spend the night?" She agreed and so I backed in and the "Host" was there in a heartbeat to collect the fee. The wife dosen't really like this area very much Besides being crowed with tent campers, there is a lot of "partying" going on all day and well into the night. Along with that, is the "eye candy" of sweet honeys waltzing around in there Bikinis. Of course, being the dirty old man that I am, I love it. Sunday night, or rally Monday morning about 1am, I was sitting out at the picnic table enjoying all of the activity going on around me, when a young fellow walked over from a near by campfire and bummed a cigarette. We talked for a few minutes and he invited me over to join his group. I joined them and was offered a Bud Light in exchange for more cigarettes. I hung out with them an hour or so and then went back to my table and listened to some tunes for awhile. All in all it was a very enjoyable evening.

I have heard much condemnation in the past concerning S&M. Seems that there is much education lacking in the general population concerning S&M. Let me give you an example. She: Oh I'm not into pain, I could never do that. He: Oh, well OK. Let me as you then, do you like a little spanking during love making? She: Yes, I do, it heights my senses. OK, in a small way that makes my point. It is all about limits. Since it is all about limits; it has to be about negotiation. "I like this, but I don't like that." Secondly it is about trust. One "usually" doesn't just "jump" into bed with another person. There is something that says, "yes, I can do this with this person." That's trust. How far one goes in receiving painful stimuli is in direct proportion to the ensuing pleasure that it gives. Endorphines turn the pain to pleasure. S&M is not for everyone for sure. But it shouldn't get the bad rap of being a perversion. It is just another way of doing things.

August 05, 2007 Hawkish Turks prepare for Iraq invasion A strike on Iraqi Kurds could be the price the PM pays for peace at home, says Simon Hooper As American and British generals draw up plans to extract their demoralised troops from Iraq, another army sits impatiently at its northern border awaiting orders to launch an invasion of its own. Faced with a resurgent PKK terror campaign, Turkey's hawkish generals have long argued the case for a strike against Kurdish militant bases inside northern Iraq. With some 140,000 troops poised, and Turkish commandos rumoured to be deep in Iraqi territory, all that has been lacking has been the political will. "What is the point of an army if it can't defend the country?" one campaigner for the ultra-nationalist MHP told me in Ankara before yesterday's general election, handing out flyers bearing the party's vaguely fascistic logo. "This government is betraying Turkey." The success of the MHP, campaigning on a pledge to hang the captive PKK leader The nationalist MHP campaigned on a pledge to hang the captive PKK leader, Abdullah Ocalan Abdullah Ocalan, has been a nasty shock for Prime Minister Erdogan's AK party, souring an otherwise emphatic election victory. Erdogan has so far refused to be drawn into what is called here 'noose politics'. But with the MHP set to form a parliamentary bloc of around 70 seats, and with the AK party seeking cross-party consent for its constitutional reform plans, sanctioning the army's military adventure could be the price he pays for an uneasy truce on the domestic front. Already Erdogan has taken a tougher stance over the prospect of Turkish intervention, warning: "Whatever is necessary could be done immediately. If this has to be done, it will be done." Ibrahim Kalin, an Ankara-based analyst, tells me it is only a matter of time before Turkey's generals get their way: "Now the elections are over, the army will say, 'You have a responsibility to give us the orders to protect the country.' The government cannot withstand that pressure for long. They will have to say yes." FIRST POSTED JULY 23, 2007 http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk?storyID=7889

Construction Of North American Superhighway May Begin Next Year North America Transportation Posted by: Michael Dudley 20 June 2006 - 7:00am "The 'nation's most modern roadway', proposed between Laredo in Texas and Duluth, Minnesota, along Interstate 35, would allow the US to bypass the west coast ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach to import goods from China and the Far East into the heart of middle America via Mexico, saving both cost and time. However, critics argue that the ten-lane road would lay a swathe of concrete on top of an already over-developed transport infrastructure and further open the border with Mexico to illegal immigrants or terrorists. According to a weekly Conservative magazine published in the US, the US administration is 'quietly yet systematically' planning the massive highway, citing as a benefit that it would negate the power of two unions, the Longshoremen and Teamsters. Another source claimed the highway was a 'bi-partisan effort' with support from both Republicans and Democrats that would reduce freight transport times across the nation by days. Eric Olson, the transportation spokesmen for the California-based Sierra Club, a national environmental awareness organisation, said the road would cause significant damage. 'Something on that scale would have a massive environmental impact,' he said. 'Building a large-scale new highway does not seem like the best solution. There is a great need for fixing our existing roads and bridges. That needs to be a priority before we start building new massive road projects.'" Despite serious environmental, immigration, and security concerns, plans for a limited-access superhighway four football fields wide, from Mexico to Canada, which would incorporate pipelines but bypass U.S. ports altogether, are nearing completion. "The 'nation's most modern roadway', proposed between Laredo in Texas and Duluth, Minnesota, along Interstate 35, would allow the US to bypass the west coast ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach to import goods from China and the Far East into the heart of middle America via Mexico, saving both cost and time. However, critics argue that the ten-lane road would lay a swathe of concrete on top of an already over-developed transport infrastructure and further open the border with Mexico to illegal immigrants or terrorists. According to a weekly Conservative magazine published in the US, the US administration is 'quietly yet systematically' planning the massive highway, citing as a benefit that it would negate the power of two unions, the Longshoremen and Teamsters. Another source claimed the highway was a 'bi-partisan effort' with support from both Republicans and Democrats that would reduce freight transport times across the nation by days. Eric Olson, the transportation spokesmen for the California-based Sierra Club, a national environmental awareness organisation, said the road would cause significant damage. 'Something on that scale would have a massive environmental impact,' he said. 'Building a large-scale new highway does not seem like the best solution. There is a great need for fixing our existing roads and bridges. That needs to be a priority before we start building new massive road projects.'" Source: The Scotsman, Jun 16, 2006 Full Story: US divided by superhighway plan

Reprinted from the blog of ~Lady Karmic Kisses~Whips N Chains ... The Pleasure Of Pain By Marianne Apostolides Psychology Today Sept/Oct 99 Pathology: The branch of medecine that deals with the nature of disease, esp its functional and structural effects. (Webster's concise edition) Catharsis: a. A technique used to relieve tension and anxiety by bringing repressed feelings and fears to consciousness. b. The therapeutic result of this process; abreaction. (www.thefreedictionary.com) Bind my ankles with your white cotton rope so I cannot walk. Bind my wrists so I cannot push you away. Place me on the bed and wrap your rope tighter around my skin so it grips my flesh. Now I know that struggle is useless, that I must lie here and submit to your mouth and tongue and teeth, your hands and words and whims. I exist only as your object. Exposed. Of every 10 people who reads these words, one or more has experimented with sadomasochism (S & M), which is most popular among educated, middle- and upper-middle-class men and women, according to psychologists and ethnographers who have studied the phenomenon. Charles Moser, Ph.D., M.D., of the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco, has researched S & M to learn the motivation behind it--to understand why in the world people would ask to be bound, whipped and flogged. The reasons are as surprising as they are varied. For James, the desire became apparent when he was a child playing war games--he always hoped to be captured. "I was frightened that I was sick," he says. But now, he adds, as a well-seasoned player on the scene, "I thank the leather gods I found this community." At first the scene found him. When he was at a party in college, a professor chose him. She brought him home and tied him up, told him how bad he was for having these desires, even as she fulfilled them. For the first time he felt what he had only imagined, what he had read about in every S & M book he could find. James, a father and manager, has a Type A personality--in-control, hard-working, intelligent, demanding. His intensity is evident on his face, in his posture, in his voice. But when he plays, his eyes drift and a peaceful energy flows through him as though he had injected heroin. With each addition of pain or restraint, he stiffens slightly, then falls into a deeper calm, a deeper peace, waiting to obey his mistress. "Some people have to be tied up to be free," he says. As James' experience illustrates, sadomasochism involves a highly unbalanced power relationship established through role-playing, bondage, and/or the infliction of pain. The essential component is not the pain or bondage itself, but rather the knowledge that one person has complete control over the other, deciding what that person will hear, do, taste, touch, smell and feel. We hear about men pretending to be little girls, women being bound in a leather corset, people screaming in pain with each strike of a flogger or drip of hot wax. We hear about it because it is happening in bedrooms and dungeons across the country. For over a century, people who engaged in bondage, beatings and humiliation for sexual pleasure were considered mentally ill. But in the 1980s, the American Psychiatric Association removed S & M as a category in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. This decision--like the decision to remove homosexuality as a category in 1973--was a big step toward the societal acceptance of people whose sexual desires aren't traditional, or vanilla, as it's called in S & M circles. What's new is that such desires are increasingly being considered normal, even healthy, as experts begin to recognize their potential psychological value. S & M, they are beginning to understand, offers a release of sexual and emotional energy that some people cannot get from traditional sex. "The satisfaction gained from S & M is something far more than sex," explains Roy Baumeister, Ph.D., a social psychologist at Case Western Reserve University. "It can be a total emotional release." Although people report that they have better-than-usual sex immediately after a scene, the goal of S & M itself is not intercourse: "A good scene doesn't end in orgasm, it ends in catharsis." S & M: No Longer A Pathology "If children at [an] early age witness sexual intercourse between adults... they inevitably regard the sexual act as a sort of ill-treatment or act of subjugation: they view it, that is, in a sadistic sense." --Sigmund Freud, 1905 Freud was one of the first to discuss S & M on a psychological level. During the 20 years he explored the topic, his theories crossed each other to create a maze of contradictions. But he maintained one constant: S & M was pathological. People become masochistic, Freud said, as a way of regulating their desire to sexually dominate others. The desire to submit, on the other hand, he said, arises from guilt feelings over the desire to dominate. He also argued that the desire for S & M can arise on its own when a man wants to assume the passive female role, with bondage and beating signifying being "castrated or copulated with, or giving birth." The view that S & M is pathological has been dismissed by the psychological community. Sexual sadism is a real problem, but it is a different phenomenon from S & M. Luc Granger, Ph.D., head of the department of psychology at the University of Montreal, created an intensive treatment program for sexual aggressors in La Macaza Prison in Quebec; he has also conducted research on the S & M community. "They are very separate populations," he says. While S & M is the regulated exchange of power among consensual participants, sexual sadism is the derivation of pleasure from either inflicting pain or completely controlling an unwilling person. Lily Fine, a professional dominatrix who teaches S & M workshops across North America, explains: "I may hurt you, but I will not harm you: I will not hit you too hard, take you further than you want to go or give you an infection." Despite the research indicating that S & M does no real harm and is not associated with pathology, Freud's successors in psychoanalysis continue to use mental illness overtones when discussing S & M. Sheldon Bach, Ph.D., clinical professor of psychology at New York University and supervising analyst at the New York Freudian Society, maintains that people are addicted to S & M. They feel compelled to be "anally abused or crawl on their knees and lick a boot or a penis or who knows what else. The problem," he continues, "is that they can't love. They are searching for love, and S & M is the only way they can try to find it because they are locked into sadomasochistic interactions they had with a parent." Linking Childhood Memories And Adult Sex "I can explore aspects of myself that I don't get a chance to explore otherwise. So even though I'm playing a role, I feel more connected with myself." --Leanne Custer, M.S.W., AIDS counselor Meredith Reynolds, Ph.D., the Sexuality Research Fellow of the Social Science Research Council, confirms that childhood experiences may shape a person's sexual outlook. "Sexuality doesn't just arise at puberty" she says. "Like other pans of someone's personality, sexuality develops at birth and takes a developmental course through a person's life span." In her work on sexual exploration among children, Reynolds has shown that while childhood experiences can indeed influence adult sexuality, the effects usually "wash out" as a person gains more sexual experience. But they can linger in some people, causing a connection between childhood memories and adult sexual play. In that case, Reynolds says, "the childhood experiences have affected something in the personality, and that in turn affects adult experiences." Reynolds' theory helps us develop a greater understanding of the desire to be a whip-bearing mistress or a bootlicking slave. For example, if a child has been taught to feel shame about her body and desires, she may learn to disconnect herself from them. Even as she gets older and gains more experience with sex, her personality may retain some part of that need for separation. S & M play may act as a bridge: Lying naked on a bed bound to the bedposts with leather restraints, she is forced to be completely sexual. The restraint, the futility of struggle, the pain, the master's words telling her she is such a lovely slave--these cues enable her body to fully connect with her sexual self in a way that has been difficult during traditional sex. Marina is a prime example. She knew from the time she was 6 years old that she was expected to succeed in school and sports. She learned to focus on achievement as a way to dismiss emotions and desires. "I learned very young that desires are dangerous," she says. She heard that message in the behavior of her parents: a depressive mother who let her emotions overtake her, and an obsessively health-conscious father who compulsively controlled his diet. When Marina began to have sexual desires, her instinct, cultivated by her upbringing, was to consider them too frightening, too dangerous. "So I became anorexic," she says. "And when you're anorexic, you don't feel desire; all you feel in your body is panic." Marina didn't feel the desire for S & M until she was an adult and had outgrown her eating disorder. "One night I asked my partner to put his hands around my neck and choke me. I was so surprised when those words came out of my mouth," she says. If she gave her partner total control over her body, she felt, she could allow herself to feel like a completely sexual being, with none of the hesitation and disconnection she sometimes felt during sex. "He wasn't into it, but now I'm with someone who is," Marina says. "S & M makes our vanilla sex better, too, because we trust each other more sexually, and we can communicate what we want." Escaping the Modern Western Ego "Like alcohol abuse binge eating and meditation, sado masochism is a way people can forget themselves." --Roy Baumeister, Ph.D., professor of psychology, Case Western Reserve University It is human nature to try to maximize esteem and control: Those are two general principles governing the study of the self. Masochism runs contrary to both, and was therefore an intriguing psychological puzzle for Baumeister, whose career has focused on the study of self and identity. Through an analysis of S & M-related letters to the sex magazine Variations, Baumeister came to believe that "masochism is a set of techniques for helping people temporarily lose their normal identity." He reasoned that the modern Western ego is an incredibly elaborate structure, with our culture placing more demands on the individual self than any other culture in history. Such high demands increase the stress associated with living up to expectations and existing as the person you want to be. "That stress makes forgetting who you are an appealing escape," Baumeister says. That is the essence of "escape" theory, one of the main reasons people turn to S&M. "Nothing matters except you, me and the sound of my voice," Lily Fine tells the tied-up and exposed businessman who begged to be spanked before breakfast. She says it slowly, making her slave wait for every sound, forcing him to focus only on her, to float in anticipation of the sensations she will create inside him. Anxieties about mortgages and taxes, stresses about business partners and job deadlines are vanquished each time the flogger hits the flesh. The businessman is reduced to a physical creature existing only in the here and now, feeling the pain and pleasure. "I'm interested in manipulating what's in the mind," Lily says. "The brain is the greatest erogenous zone." In another S & M scene, Lily tells a woman to take off her clothes, then dresses her only with a blindfold. She commands the woman not to move. Lily then takes a tissue and begins moving it over the woman's body in different patterns and at varying speeds and angles. Sometimes she lets the edge of the tissue just barely brush the woman's stomach and breasts; sometimes she bunches the tissue and creates swirls on her back and all the way down. "The woman was quivering. She didn't know what I was doing to her, but she was liking it," Lily remembers with a smile. Escape theory is further supported by an idea called "frame analysis," developed by the late Irving Goffman, Ph.D. According to Goffman, despite its popular conception as darkly wild and orgiastic, S & M play has complex rules, rituals, roles and dynamics that create a "frame" around the experience. "Frames suspend reality, They create expectations, norms and values that set this situation apart from other parts of life," confirms Thomas Weinberg, Ph.D., a sociologist at Buffalo State College in New York and the editor of S & M: Studies in Dominance & Submission (Prometheus Books, 1995). Once inside the frame, people are free to act and feel in ways they couldn't at other times. S & M: Part of the Sexual Continuum S & M has inspired the creation of many psychological theories in addition to the ones discussed here. Do we need so many? Perhaps not. According to Stephanie Saunders, Ph.D., associate director of the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction at Indiana University, "a lot of behaviors that are scrutinized because they are seen to be marginal are really a part of the continuum of sexuality and sexual behavior." After all, the ingredients in good S & M play--communication, respect and trust--are the same ingredients in good traditional sex. The outcome is the same, too--a feeling of connection to the body and the self. Laura Antoniou, a writer whose work on S & M has been published by Masquerade Books in New York City, puts it another way: "When I was a child, I had nothing but S & M fantasies. I punished Barbie for being dirty. I did Bondage Barbie, dominance with GI Joe. S & M is simply what turns me on." Whip Smart: Beyond the Boundaries of Safe Play While S & M can be a psychologically healthy activity--its motto is "safe, sane and consensual"--sometimes things do get out of hand: Abuse It is rare, but some "Tops" get too involved in power and forget to monitor their treatment of the "Bottom." "I call them 'Natural Born Tops,'" says dominatrix Lily Fine, "and I don't have time for them." Also, some bottoms want to be beaten because they have low self-esteem and think they deserve it. They are forlorn, absent and unresponsive during and after a scene, in this case, S & M ceases to be play and becomes pathological. Boundaries A small percentage of people inappropriately bring S & M power play into other facets of their life. "Most people in S & M circles are dominant or submissive in very specific situations, while in their everyday life they can play a whole range of roles," says psychology Professor Luc Granger. But, he continues, if the only way a person can relate to someone else is through a kind of sadomasochistic game, then there is probably a deeper psychological problem. The Use of S & M as Therapy People often confuse the fact that they feel good after S & M with the idea that S & M is therapy, says psychology Professor Roy Baumeister. "But to prove that something is therapeutic, you have to prove that it has lasting beneficial effects on mental health...and it's hard to prove even that therapy is therapeutic." In mental health terms, S & M doesn't make you better and it doesn't make you worse. Marianne Apostolides is author of Inner Hunger: A Young Women's Struggle through Anorexia and Bulimia (W.W. Norton, 1996). Publication: Psychology Today Publication Date: Sep/Oct 99 (Document ID: 417)

Just got home from having my head MRI'ed. I hate those. It was my first one and hopefully my last but it moved to number one on my favorite things to hate list. I told them there wasn't any thing in there but mush but they wanted to look and see anyway. Sheesh. Well it's Friday. TGIF... I hope all of my "Family", "Friends", and "Fans" have a great weekend. Think of me will you...

Let me just say off the top of it that all in all it was a nice trip. Oh, I know that some of you might say, "How could you enjoy it out there with all the rain?" Well, that's an easy one to answer. It didn't rain all day every day, just every day it rained some. As usual, the neighboring RV'ers were friendly and even helpful from time to time when the electrical modular in the trailer went afoul and I had to come back home to get a trickle chargers. Using that to over-ride the malfunctioning one that is built in worked very satisfactorily. I pulled the trailer into Hickory Hill RV camp on Wed, the 25th in the early afternoon. I only paid for three days, as the good spots were all taken and I had to select a pad that was about as far from the lake as could be. I was hoping one would open up in that time. One did, and I moved to the very nice spot that I had had last November right on the water. Besides, the little electrical problem, there was the problem of firewood thieves however. On different evenings some who think they can just walk around and take what they want, walked around and took my firewood. I reported it to the Rangers but there is little they can do on a deal like that so I just brought down a cures on the thieves and am satisfied that they will be "rewarded" for there sin. Fishing seemed to be good all around me but not where I was fishing. I know, get a boat. I will try to do that. Well, I'm home now. Sorry to see that only one of my "family/friends" left me greetings over the 4th of July. I guess they must have been busy with others. No matter. I am here now. So I look to the futur.

...Were you ever out in the Great Aline, when the moon was awful clear, And the icy mountains hemmed you in with a silence you most could hear; With only the howl of a timber wolf, and you camped there in the cold, A falf-dead thing in a stark, dead world, clean mad for the muck called gold; While high overhead, greeen, yellow and red, the North Lights swept in bars? -- Then you've a hunch what the music meant . . . hunger and night and the stars. And hunger not of the belly kind that's banished with bacon and beans. But the gnawing hunger of lonely men for a home and all that it means; For a fireside far from the cares that are, four walls and a roof above; But oh! so cramful of cozy joy, and crowned with a womans's love -- A woman dearer than all the world; and true as Heaven is true.... (God! how ghastly she looks through her rouge the lady that's know as Lou.)

Sees that those who wish for all who enter this country, whether legally or illegally, be allowed to do so without regards for this counrty's laws. There are lies being told about people doing killing farmwork for little money, which I will admit might be true, but the real truth is that most are taking the skilled labor jobs in constrution and in the hotel and restraunt business were not only pay much better than farm work but do in fact take jobs away from REAL American citizens. However, this illegal imigration situation is solved, I hope that all involved would be more honest about who is doing what.