Abducted!

When Russell Crowe was up for an Oscar for Gladiator, this plot surfaced. Someone out there wanted to kidnap Russell Crowe and remove his fingers. They planned to strike just before the Oscars. The FBI got involved. Decided it was a credible threat.

I'm not a finger fetishist. If I was going to go through all the trouble of kidnapping Russell Crowe, toothsome morsel that he is, I probably wouldn't pay much attention to his digits. But abduction, mutilation, and torture kinda put him on the map in the landscape of my JO fantasies. As if his role in Romper Stomper didn't.

I haven't heard much about any kidnap plots this year.

Must be kinda weird being a movie star, and knowing--how could they not know?--that you loom so large in the fantasies of a sizeable number of whackos out there. The FBI calls you in for a sit-down and tells you that somebody out there wants your fingers to keep.

I hope, like with any unwanted attention, they'd be flattered.

A guy I was talking to a few weeks ago told me he had a Mr. Benson. This... this... Man contacted him. The Man was wealthy, and he posed to they guy a question: "What would it take for you to belong to me?" The guy checked out the Man. The Man was legit. Senior partner in a brokerage house. Owned a big house just outside of a major city. And apparently he had a cell somewhere in his compound where he wanted to keep this guy I was talking to.

"Wow," I said when I was told the story, "That's pretty hot."

"Yeah," said they guy, "That's real hot." And smiled.

I guess it's probably not gonna really happen. Things like that don't happen in the real world, only in stories in the tattered pages of back issues of Drummer magazine. Think of the logistics! If you have a dog or kids, you can make arrangements when you head off for a long theater weekend in London or whatever. Not so when you've got a man chained up out in the pool house.

But it's kind of the Ur fable of the Master/slave set, huh? Abducted. Sold on the auction block. Spending the rest of your life in slavery to The Master. Retold countless times. The rumors fly on the internet that it "really happens." Back in the days when S/M was for me just a fantasy life, I was willing to believe that again and again when Mastr09754 on AOL (who had no profile and no pic to offer) claimed that that's what he was all about and all I had to do was give my weekly schedule and one night as I was locking up the office at work an unmarked van would pull up and that would be the last the world heard of me.

And now, I'm able to appreciate the Ur-fantasy from the other side, too. That sweet tattooed boy with the sad, lost look in his eyes that filled up my tank at the Sunoco station in Doylestown. How cool would it be... to take him, capture him... the words are so resonant. Keep him chained. Break him by nothing else than the force of my will, my desire to own him and possess him. To take his life and independence from him and make him mine.

Yep. That's the Ur-fantasy.

Here's what I know of dog psychology. Wolves have something called the "hunting cycle." Wolves prowl, and then pick up a scent. They follow the scent. They spot the prey. They stalk the prey. The prey give chase. The wolf runs down the prey, pursuing until fortune or fatigue give opportunity. The kill. The wolf eats its fill, then covers the carcass, marking the area with piss and scat.

Now, here's the thing. If the wolf is interrupted at any part of the hunting cycle, the wolf has to go back to the start. It's been hardwired by evolution. And what we've done with the dog--working dogs in particular--is to tease out elements of the hunting cycle that would be helpful and keep them intact, discarding the others. For example, my dog is mostly hound. So he's big on 'find the scent, follow the scent.' But the other elements of the hunting cycle are gone. I remember once in Jersey City, he found a wounded pigeon while I was walking him one night. I noticed in the dark that he had something in his mouth and bent in to inspect. And sure enough, he had this pigeon in his jaws. But he didn't know what to do with it. He just sat there, looking confused. The shake-it-to-snap-its-neck thing that a differently bred dog would get was lost to him.

And what's the point of this digression?

Well, I think it could be argued that much of S/M is just retelling of discrete elements of the Ur-Fable. Just like the elements of the hunting cycle.

Huh.

Interesting thought.

But where does the Ur-fable come from? How did that work its way into our collective subconscious? Is it some universal childhood experience? is it something like nest building with birds... it's just in there because of something that Homo Sapiens sapiens had to deal with back there on the veldt a million years ago?

Tell me where is beauty bred? In the heart or in the head?

Well, time for house cleaning.

I'll drop this pic into my blog. It was emailed to me years ago. I have no idea who the artist is, so I can't give attribution. (Any help in this regard would be appreciated.) I think it's way hot.


boy in chains

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