It's 12:45 am. I really should be in bed, but I'm totally juiced. GMSMA's program tonight, the first of the year, was devoted to single tail whips. The presenter was the guy who taught me how to throw all those many months ago, and who put into my hand a baby bullwhip made by none other than Joe Wheeler. So I spent the night in that dreamy place I go to when ever I'm around men and whips. Cracking must release positively charged ions into the air. The presenter, whom we'll call ARtist, concluded the program by demonstrating his technique on the back of the guy who lead the workshop with him last January. Time was short, so they started in without any warm up. Just a few strokes to give the audience an idea of what it looked like. Collectively, we all stepped out of time. Forty-five minutes passed.

I saw several men at Inferno who are recognized as being among the best in the world at whipping. In retrospect, they made me feel sort of inadequate. It was like watching a thunderstorm seeing them work. Relentless and driving as a force of nature. Nothing for the bottom to do but relent. Let the blows fall where they may. My approach, budding though it may be, is different. For me, it's all about connection. It's dancing. I match my moves and adjust constantly to my partner. I'm reacting to him reacting to me reacting to him in infinite regression. I'm leading the scene and the both of us only in the sense that I can see him but he can't see me. But that's a slender thread. Because I'm lost to the the music. Like splitting firewood, like batting a softball, like shooting a pistol at a target, your ego gets in the way. If you think about what you're doing, you think about you doing it, and you fail. Think no-thought. Find your center (your Chi). Focus on the point where you want the whip to kiss, the ax to fall, the ball to sail, the bullet to hit home. You don't exist, only that point does. Your body knows how to do the rest. Or learns over time. With practice.

And of course, absence of ego is critical to love. To the great Giving Up. Anyway, ARtist wielded the whip more sensually than anyone I've seen. And it's all about sensuality for me. Even though he was at the first session of Inferno, I had never seen ARtist do a scene before. All this to say that tonight was terrifically affirming for me. As in, "Yes! I'm doing it right!" As with writing, as with painting, you master technique, and then you develop your voice. You let what's been within you, dormant, all this time come out through this new medium.

After the meeting, I recruited some guys to help me carry my dis-assembled St. Andrew's Cross back to my jeep. Once loaded, Past President agreed to come sit with me while I (finally) got some food in my stomach. We talked the way we always do, like two people who have had eleven cups of coffee each talk. "Yes, and..." Exactly, like..." "And what's more..." "But you see..." Glorious. Past President seems to live life telescopicly (sp.?) Going at it full bore, with white hot intensity, drinking deeply and greedily. It reminds me of a snippet of a poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson that I recall. Something like: "...crossing a field at night, frost glistening in the moonlight, I become a transparent eyeball." Ralph Waldo must have been chowing down on moldy rye bread.

Anyway, now I really really have to get to bed. Buona notte.