Okay, I know I said radio silence, but Max decided to bring the laptop, and we got the high-speed connection going in the room, so...
 
We're here at Thunder. Or rather, it's the gathering storm, if you will. Kinky people are beginning to invade. but we won't have complete control of the whole hotel until tomorrow, when the conference officially begins.
 
It's always rather amusing, actually, to walk around the hotel lobby and the bar on Thursday afternoon and say to oneself, "They're here for the conference, but they're not. Oh, he is definitely one of us, but those women aren't..." We more or less behave ourself in the public spaces (most of us do, anyway) and especially so when the vanilla folks are still here. But you can spot the kinksters...
 
It's harder on Sunday afternoon, when the hotel starts checking in vanilla guests again. We've had free run of the place for two days, and everyone is pleasantly exhausted by a weekend of non-stop activity in an entirely kink-oriented world. One has to remind oneself to be mindful, once again, of explicit conversations in a close quarters with the non-kinky folks. Not everyone does the re-entry thing well, you understand. Last year at this con I was standing in an elevator with three perverts and two airline personnel and listened to this conversation.

"So I was flogging the clothespins off his balls last night at the party and a little bit of skin came with them. You should have heard him howl."
"I did hear him carrying on, but I couldn't see what you were doing, exactly. I had my hands full with the suspension X and I were doing."
 
Banjo eyes on the airline people, to which the two men having the conversation seemed completely oblivious. Or maybe they were doing it just to fuck with them, I don't know. I don't approve of that kind of thing generally - I think it's rude and childish. I don't want to be forced to listen to intimate things about the sexual lives of most strangers, either. But on this occasion, for some reason, I was torn between annoyance and amusement. Maybe it was the utterly blase tone of voice they were speaking in...

Tomorrow we'll get out registration packets, look over the workshop schedule - Thunder has the best workshops!  - and then just sit in the lobby and watch out friends arrive. Then dinner, and then - the dungeon party.I don't know if I'll post again, but if I get a minute, I'll drop by...

Weirdass Email of the Week....

Dear Queenly Mistress,
I strongly urge you to not allow or tolerate me to be free any longer from getting your periods forced on me and be another woman to get your long overdue sexual justice PAY BACK TIMES and START TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS WITH ME AND GIVING ME THE REAL BUSINESS WITH YOUR ULTIMATE WOMANHOOD and use your used cunt hole stick tampons for what they were meant to be used for by you and force my cunt hole mouth to get stuffed and rammed full of them for all of them to EXPLODE with your period for me to have to cuntsume every last drop of your cunt flow period.
Why should men be free from periods and having no sympathetic caring feelings about what you as a woman have to endure with the cramps, bloating, discomforting pain, inconvenience, time taken from your life, expense and irritable moody feelings??????

What I'm supposed to think when I read this: "Wow, what an amazingly sympathetic, unselfish guy he must be, to make me an offer like this. Nothing at all in it for him, no, no…"
What I actually think: "What a manipulative fetishist."
And who knew that simply recieving a woman's used tampons by mail would lead to "cramps, bloating, discomforting pain, inconvenience, time taken from your life, expense and irritable moody feelings"?

Queenly Mistress, why waste them by throwing them away, when you can put them to a positive use for yourself and get paid for having your periods forced on you???Why should you have the expense of having to purchase the box of unused TAMPAX TAMPONS, when you can force it on me as part of your period forcing power?????
I will allow you $5.00 to $7.00 so I and not you have this expense.
I will allow you $5.00 for the shipping cost for you to send me your used love hole stick tampons.
HOW MANY used FEMININE WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION tampons X $5.00 is the way you financially inflict the discomforting pain on me with your period being forced on me.

Gee, apparently Bush has been looking in the wrong places for those weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Those clever Iraqi women have been hiding them under their skirts. Can he really think I'm going to be pleased by the idea that using a piece of bleached cotton to absorb a few tablespoons of my blood transforms it into the equivalent of a anthrax lab? I've heard of vagina dentata, but this is ridiculous.

A few examples for you:
6 of your used tootsie roll pussy pop sucker tampons = 6 X $5.00=$30.00
My expense of box of unused TAMPAX or OB TAMPONSz=7.00
Shipping cost for you to send me your weapons of mass destruction = $5.00
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Financial pain forced on me by you FORCING your period on me = $ 32.00
Rounded off dollar amount Your Forced Period on me total expense = $ 40.00
12 of your used tootsie roll pussy pop sucker tampons = 12 X $5.00 =$60.00
My expense of box of unused TAMPAX or OB TAMPONS = $ 7.00
Shipping cost for you to send me your weapons of mass destruction = $5.00
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
I can not physically endure what you do, so this is how you make your period difficult for me.

No, saving up used tampons to box up and ship to some weirdo is how I make my period difficult for me. It actually isn't the horror story you're trying convince me it is, buddy.
I edited for sheer length here, since he goes through all the numbers for 18 tampons, and then for 24, and then 28, and so on, adding by fours, all the way to...

Unrealistic but possible 54 total period expense= $282.00 rounded = $285.00
PIPE DREAMS 60 total period expense = $312.00 rounded = $315.00
70 total period expense = $362.00 rounded = $365.00
80 total period expense = $412.00 rounded = $415.00

I wonder if this guy's an accountant. Or maybe a 4th grade math tutor – his multiplying-by-four prowess is impressive, although his grammar and syntax need work.

The purpose and objective of my e-mail to you is for me to have you educated that now your womanhood has caught up with me and found out about me. There is no where for me to run or hide that your womanhood will not know about and that you do have me at the complete mercy of your ultimate womanhood and there is not a dam thing that I can do about it.

Now, this makes my pussy sound like either Santa Claus or the CIA. Except if my pussy were the CIA, it would have found Bin Laden by now. And given Bin Laden and his comrades' views on women, the idea of a giant, marauding pussy chasing them down, a la Woody Allen, is probably far more terrifying than being chased by the CIA.

Emails from friends that I haven't had time to answer…


"How was the shoot with Monk?" Great, even though he kept making me laugh when I was trying to look all Mistress-y and shit. I've seen the raw files, but I'm waiting for the Photoshop maestro to finish color-balancing and so on before I post a sample.

"When do you leave for Thunder in the Mountains?" Thursday, so there will be radio silence around here from Thursday to Monday. Try not to get DT's or anything.

"How did your date with Jake go?" Lovely. I took him with me to do a little fetishwear shopping – it’s so nice that Rose Algren, designer of many things sexy, stretchy and shiny, only lives about ten blocks away from me. I can just go over and do my shopping in her dining room.
After stopping by there, we went to dinner at Septieme, where I actually did not run into anyone I know. I think that's a first for me at that restaurant.
And then I took him over to my dungeon and showed him around...

"Hey, let's go do X when you get back from Thunder!" Well, I'd like that, but things will be complicated at my house soon, because my mother is coming to visit me. Brace yourself for some whining about that, because I'm really not cut out to be submissive for more than about five minutes at a time. And my mother is a small, sweet woman with big blue eyes, a gentle southern accent, and the uncanny ability to completely dominate not only me, but damn near everyone who's in the room with her. Max is somewhat immune to her bizarre power, but he can't protect me all the time.

Don't get me wrong. I love my mom. I even like my mom. There are many, many wonderful things about my mom. It's just that she's kind of like Napoleon in a Chico's tunic.

So she's here, and then she leaves to go to Portland for a few days, so I'll have a little window of freedom in the middle of her visit. Except, while she's gone – guess what? Max and I are having another houseguest. Guess who it is. Midori.

Now Midori is way cool, and I'm happy to have her as my guest while she's here in Seattle teaching classes, but Jesus, what kind of cosmic joke is this, to have my mother and Midori – easily two of the world's most dominant women – staying in our house, pretty much back-to-back! What is the universe trying to tell me with this?

I'm guessing that of the two, Midori will be much easier to cope with, because she has a lot of people just dying to bottom to her. My mother, however, has only my brother and myself – and sometimes, I think, her husband – to hypnotize into obedience. Although perhaps I'm underestimating her - perhaps she has this effect on everyone. Somehow, I don't find that comforting.

So, I'm sketching out a "Control Tower" column, and I'm thinking about doing something like "The Pleasures Of Topping". I've gotten a few comments here that were essentially "Why do you enjoy doing what you do?" questions, and I thought it would be cool to write about what I get out of my scenes.
So, if there's a particular aspect of being the top in a BDSM scene that puzzles you, feel free to tell me about that now, either with a comment or in an email. I can't absolutely promise I'll address it, but if it works with what I'm already thinking of, I will.

Completely unrelated: An amusing animation starring Bush and Kerry, to the tune of Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land".