Each man wants not universal love, but to be loved alone

W.H. Auden had my number. Well, I guess he had a lot of peoples numbers. When he wrote that line anyway.

I'm spending time (whilst driving, hauling lumber for firewood out of the woods, sitting on the porch and listening to the night sounds) thinking about the Dad hunt. The desire grows daily.

Just what is it that I want?

Good question.

I want to be valued. Some man's Pearl of Great Price. A champion. A good boy to my Dad.

Been spending time in the AOL chat rooms lately. I'm always struck by the pervasiveness of abduction fantasies harbored by farflung submissives. "I want you to abduct me into slavery, Sir." Unlikely that I'm going to be driving the Jeep Liberty out to you in Kokomo, waiting patiently outside your condo for you to take the trash out to the curb one night, making with the pillow case, handcuffs, and ball gag, and driving you back to Pennsylvania to keep you chained up in the cellar next to the sump pump. But I can understand a little better now what's going on there. What he's saying is, "Want me that bad. Prove to me that I'm worth that."

Lthredge has a pretty amazing piece he's written called 'You.' (If memory serves, that's the name of it.) [Note to 'Edge: email me a link for posting, if'n you please.] He describes (brialliantly) the desire and longing and waiting and searching for The Strong Man. And how, tired of waiting, the narrator transforms himself into that man. It's beautiful. I see my own experience as the mirror image of that.

Something fused for me at Inferno this year. (I know, I know... it's coming. Really it is. Really. No. Really.) Perhaps, in a way, I am filled with domination.

Have you had the experience of reading a book that changes your life? In reading it (The Illusion of Technique by William Barrett would be a good example from my life), everything crystalizes, and you see the world in a whole new way. Call to mind the feeling as you read the last words on the last page and close the book. You're full. The experience is complete.

This is not to say that it's the end. Life and learning go on. And, if you should pick up the book years later, it's disappointing. It's become a part of you, so it can't have that same effect of smashing your Weltanshauung to pieces and building it anew. And you look at it with a more critical eye (I can't believe Barrett was so catty in discussing Simone de Beauvoir! Fuckin' A!) and realize that ultimately, it's just a book. One mortal man's scribblings.

So I'm not through with being a Top. Heaven forfend! As Nietzsche said of music, life without whipping is a mistake. I am totally looking forward to introducing a wonderful bear of a man to the experience of getting singletailed in October. (My birthday month.)

But Top space has become for me... well, sort of like New York City became over the thirteen years that I lived there. At first, it was strange and exhiliarating. Gradually, I came to know the ins and outs, getting to know the farflung quarters (132nd Street and St. Ann's Avenue in the South Bronx, Third Street between First and Second, Second Avenue and 81st Street, Flatbush Avenue and Lincoln Road). And all of those individual blocks and corners came together to form a coherent (mostly) whole. And I am at home there. I know my way around. I know which pizza places make it just the way I like it. I know good places to sit and have a latte and read a book. And though there's always something new, something yet to be discovered, past experience leads me to have a pretty good idea of what I'll find when I trek off to that new corner in that unexplored neighborhood.

And, history is a prison, though if you're lucky, it's a comfy minimum security prison for white collar criminals with a great gym and a library. Your past experiences and feelings determine your expecations of the future. Your perspective, and indeed, the person you are, becomes hidebound.

So, too, with Top space. I'm a known quantity. And I'm known best of all to myself.

I like to think that sub space is different. Although, what do I know, I could be wrong.

I once was told about a group of New Yorkers traveling down to DELTA together. One was a Top, and two were bottoms. They were driving down in one car. The Top packed in all of his gear, filling the trunk, 4/5ths of the back seat, the wheel wells. This wasn't a problem for the two bottoms he was traveling with, as they basically had with them all they needed for the run: clean socks to change into.

In my romantacized notions about a sub, I love that image. Setting off to meet the world with just what you'll need, a change of socks. Traveling as light as possible, so that you will be unencumbered in taking on collars and restraints and hoods and rope harnesses, and bedding down in dungeons and cages and on bondage tables or at your Sir's booted feet.

Being a Top is being a priest. Being a bottom is being some mad itinerent monk.

Being kept naked. This is another recurring thing in Mondo AOL Chat Rooms. "Will you keep me shaved and naked, Sir?" Oh yeah. And when it's cold, you'll feel the cold. And when you're sleeping on the floor, you'll feel the grit of the dust on the floor. And when you labor for Me outside, you'll be bitten and stung by insects, and the sun will burn you, and your skin will be scratched by brambles and sawgrass and nettles. Physical sensation is not what you try to protect yourself from, it's what you open yourself to.



Hey, Dad.

Here I am, Sir.

Waiting. Waiting for Your cigar smoking, bushy bearded big old self. Waiting to feel the weight of Your collar around my neck and hear the cl-click of the padlock securing it in place. Waiting to submit myself to Your expertise with floggers and canes and straps and paddles and rope to as testimony to my love for You. Waiting to taste Your boot leather and Your piss and Your sweat. Waiting to feel Your arms encircle me and hold me. Waiting to hear You say, "Good boy. I'm proud of you."

And... y'know... waiting to show You what a champion You've collared, when I take some sweet strong man out to the barn and whip him till he's singing his birthday song under Your watchful eye.

Here I am.

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