The thoughts and experiences of a person in the BDSM scene

So last weekend, I took my giant tiki spoon out for a spin.  The testing occurred at a play party at Grove Lane Studios in Frederick, Maryland.  That facility is quite awesome, with lounge spaces, a dedicated aftercare room, a balcony space, several private rooms, and a large main dungeon.  It is definitely a good place to have a party, and I had a great time.  I mainly stayed in the balcony space, and then later hit one of the private rooms.

It was in one of the private rooms where my friend and I tested the tiki spoon.  Since this was primarily a test of the spoon, I did this with minimal restraints, no gag, and no blindfold.  After all, the idea was to see just what it could do, and for that, I needed to be able to communicate what I was feeling, and see how things were going.  Going into this test, considering that the spoon is not a particularly heavy object, I expected for it to sting regardless of how it was used.  This turned out not to be the case, about which I was pleasantly surprised.  Turned out that it is a delightfully versatile instrument of torture, depending on how you choose to use it.

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It’s always a great feeling of accomplishment to finish a project.  Especially a project that I sat on for as long as this one.  You may remember the large wooden tiki spoon that I had been working on last year.  I bought it in February, discussed how it had potential in April, gave an update on it later in April, put some black stain on it in May, and then let it sit collecting dust for a year, since I more or less withdrew from the scene after that bad experience last July.  Having withdrawn from the scene for a while after that, only going to two functions in ten months (a munch and a class), I saw no reason to finish the spoon, putting it low on my priority list.

However, now I’m slowly easing my way back into the scene, as I’m now occasionally playing with someone that I used to casually play with last year at DCDungeon (now DC Speakeasy), and while I haven’t yet been to a public event in 2013, the time will soon come.  I’ve got my previous bag of fun, plus I have some new stuff, as I’ve gotten a blue zentai suit, a Sportsheets hogtie set, plus a big roll of sticky stretch wrap.  The zentai is mainly for me – I love the feeling of being played with while fully encased in spandex.  It also makes whole body an item for sensation play, as the spandex has its own texture that’s very different from that of skin.  Then the Sportsheets set is just pretty awesome.  I bought it not so much for the hogtie element, but because I wanted a set of four cuffs, and this was the most economical way to do it.  Additionally, because the four cuffs are all supposed to clip to a fifth piece that links it all together, all four pieces are identical.  That means that if they’re being used like handcuffs, each can be separately clipped to the other, which makes it harder to escape from.  Then the stretch wrap was a lucky find, and I got it for free.  The potential for that is limitless, at least until it all gets used up.

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Like most people in the fetish community, I was shocked and saddened to learn about the demise of 824 North Calvert Street, the former home of the Baltimore Play House.  For those not familiar with what happened, the building at 824 North Calvert Street in Baltimore was the site of a major fire in the early morning of January 24 (more photos).  As I understand it, the building, already damaged (and never repaired) from the effects of Hurricane Sandy a few months prior, caught fire when the roof cracked under the weight of ice, which led to an electrical fire.  That more or less destroyed it, as the entire building went up, and there was a partial collapse of the roof.  There were no firefighter or civilian injuries related to the fire.  My understanding is that the Play House staff had vacated the building about two weeks prior, but it was later revealed that all of the contents of the Play House had not yet been removed, and were lost in the fire.  The loss of the building was one thing, but the loss of the contents of the building really made me sad.  After all, when a person moves their residence, putting all of one’s stuff into the new place makes the new place start to feel like “home”.  And the Play House had a lot of neat stuff in it that was different from that at The Crucible in DC and DCDungeon (now DC Speakeasy) in Rockville.

I had planned a trip up to Baltimore for April 5, where I was going to do some vanilla photography.  I am something of an accomplished photographer in my spare time, and was out shooting photos in a few neighborhoods in Baltimore.  So while I was already up in Baltimore, I made a stop over by the old Play House.  Since this was a vanilla trip, my official purpose of photographing the building was to document urban decay as exemplified by a burned out structure, or, as an employee at Iggie’s Pizza (the restaurant next door to the old Play House) described it, “ruin porn”.

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It was never my intention to take nearly four months off from this blog, but for a blog called Bondage Diaries, I suppose that one would need to have bondage to write about in the virtual diary before one can post.  And I’ve been more or less out of the scene since the incident in July where I was nonconsensually humiliated at DCDungeon, which left me unable to trust the person that I had been playing with up to that time.  I went to the Rockville Munch in September, where I had a good time, but otherwise, I’ve been out of things.  I haven’t played, I’ve only been to one munch, I’ve let the spoon sit up on a shelf in the closet collecting dust, and I’ve been pursuing other interests for a while.  I have been casually looking for a play partner/relationship/whatever lately, both on OKCupid and Collarme.com, but I haven’t had any success with it.  It will come with time, I’m sure.

I’m also not entirely sure yet about where I really “belong” in the fetish scene.  I’m sure that there’s a place for me, but I don’t think I’ve found it yet.  I am 31 years old, I identify as male, I play as a bottom, I list my orientation on FetLife as “heteroflexible”, and I am quite single.  And with what I’ve tried so far, I feel as though I’ve had difficulty relating to these folks.  I feel as though I’m too old for the DC TNG crowd, and it seemed that in that group, people weren’t as amazingly friendly as I would like, and it seemed that many people had their cliques.  However, I also felt somewhat out of place with the older crowd in the Rockville scene, as I felt that those folks had far more experience than I did – so much so that I felt somewhat inadequate by comparison because I lacked that experience.  Plus it’s far less intimidating to meet people when you’re meeting someone with someone else vs. doing so alone, and I was going to these things alone.  It is very possible to feel lonely amongst a crowd of people, and I got that distinct feeling of loneliness a number of times with both the Rockville scene and the DC TNG scene.

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For those of you who don’t know, I am an avid swimmer, and I can usually be found swimming laps at an indoor pool several times a week.  Recently at the pool, I finally went digging through the various swim fins and other equipment that the pool makes available for swimmers’ use.  Kickboards notwithstanding, the item that I’ve found most useful for my workout is a pair of short fins.  But amongst the various items in the big bin of stuff is a monofin.  The monofin looks like this:

Image: Amazon.com

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If there is such a thing as a bad night at the dungeon, this one was it.  I was mistreated in my scene, and then treated as a fifth wheel outside of that.  It’s definitely caused me to reevaluate how I view D/s and my own role within it.

Recently, my regular play partner became involved in a relationship with someone whom she called her “Sir”.  Since she became involved with this person, our play scenes had become more dominant/submissive with the inequality that comes with that designation, rather than filling the top or bottom role between equals.  I was being ordered around more in our scenes.  Pre-scene negotiations became almost nonexistent.  “Give me your hands,” was usually the extent of it, and if I attempted to negotiate a scene, I was told that it wasn’t my place as the sub.  If I tried to explain mid-scene that something wasn’t working for me or getting too intense, then I was told, in an annoyed sort of way, that I was “topping from the bottom”.  And she would refuse to gag me, which, as I mentioned before, I need in order to get to subspace.  And if I’m making noise, gag or not, I’m not there.  I’ve noticed that when I’ve reached subspace, I stop making any sound.  I stop talking (or “mmphing”, as the case may be), I don’t giggle, and I don’t make happy sounds.  I just go silent.

So last Friday, I got together with my play partner for our usual dungeon night routine: dinner somewhere and then off to DCDungeon.  I knew that her “Sir” would be coming along, and that was fine, because I was interested in meeting him.  He seemed like a nice enough guy at dinner.  We talked about whatever, and then when dinner was done, we headed over to DCDungeon.  At DCDungeon, after my play partner and I showed her “Sir” around the place (it was his first time), it was time for a scene.  As I had understood it going into this, we were going to be beaten together.  That’s not how it happened.  First she was flogged by “Sir”, and then when he was done, she was going to do similarly to me.

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Friday night at DCDungeon was definitely an odd one.  DCDungeon was having an open play night as planned, and nature was planning to send a derecho through the Washington DC area.

The night started out normally enough.  Hope and I went over to DCDungeon for open play, paid our admission, said hello, and got started.  Today, Hope was trying something out on me that she had recently learned at a fetish event.  For this, I stripped down to my shorts (the shorts I was wearing when I entered – not boxer shorts) was given a rope harness around my chest, and then my hands were tied behind me with rope handcuffs.  No rope around the legs, no blindfold, and no gag.  However, I was told to be quiet, or else the play would end – mental bondage.  Then I was told to bend over the padded massage table, which I did.  So I was bent over, with my chest and stomach on the top of the table, feet on the ground, head over the back side of the table, and my behind in the air.  I was ready to go.

Hope certainly went to town on me, for sure.  She used various implements on my backside, emphasizing how it hurts more and more as you strike the same spot over and over again.  Then another person came in and allowed Hope to use his bamboo cane.  I had never been caned before.  I was about to be.  The strikes were fairly light, but with enough of them in quick succession, I really started to feel it.  But according to Hope, it wasn’t as fun doing the caning through clothes since she couldn’t see marks.  So that was the end of my shorts.  Hope undid my belt, and removed my shorts.  She also removed my underwear, dropping both to the floor around my ankles.  I stepped out of them the rest of the way and then pushed them to the side with my feet, somewhat to Hope’s annoyance.

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When I was up at DCDungeon about a week and a half ago, I finally got to play on the Catherine wheel that’s there.  For those not familiar with DCDungeon, on the back wall of Studio C is a large wooden wheel that rotates.  It can be rotated by machine or manually.  It has handholds at the top, leather cuffs at the bottom, and can be used for inversion play, among other things.

This is what the wheel looks like:

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So Friday night was fun!  Hope and I went up to Baltimore to go to open play night at the Baltimore Play House.  That is a very different beast compared to DCDungeon, that’s for sure.  While DCDungeon is most definitely an office building in its character, the Play House has a certain charm to it.  My understanding is that the Play House has been around since the mid 1990s, and then I believe that the building is much older than that.  It has an attached parking garage, and the atmosphere was very friendly.  Hope and I did two scenes while at the Play House.

The first scene involved bondage, sensation play, impact play, and some very light knife play.  First, however, we needed to get a few things set up.  The Play House has a rig with a lot of heavy cabling on it that can be paid out as needed, and we needed to pay out some of the cables to accommodate our scene (you’ll see).  Once we got the cables at the right length, we got all the equipment ready.  I had bought two ballgags online recently, and was going to be gagged with one of them.  One is a conventional ballgag, and the other is a trainer ballgag that I got at an amazing discount.  I wanted to be gagged with the trainer, but unfortunately, I had forgotten one of the parts for it.  Thus I would be gagged conventionally.  We were also going to take a blindfold that I had bought online out for a spin for the first time.

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People could (and do) write volumes on language and terminology, and on how we use language to define ourselves.  In my four months in the scene, I have thought about what words get used in places quite a bit.

One thing I’ve always found interesting about content of a sexual nature is the use of “naughty words” over plainer language.  For instance, the rear end is usually referred to as “ass”, and not as “behind”, “backside”, or even “butt”.  Likewise, I’ve noticed that the penis is usually referred to as “cock”.  I’ve always found it interesting, mostly because I find such terms to be uncouth, even when used sexually.  Maybe it’s just me. I wonder if others feel similarly about the use of “foul language” as the normal term.  However, the use of foul language is more just a pet peeve of mine than anything else.  I’m not fond of it, but whatever. If it makes people tick, then more power to them, I suppose.

The terms that I think about most are the terms “dominant”, “submissive”, “top”, and “bottom”.  That thinking usually centers around how I identify myself in that concept set as I learn more about my own style and behaviors in scene settings.  Going in back in January, I thought that dominant = top and top = dominant, and likewise I thought that submissive = bottom and bottom = submissive.  In other words, I thought that the terms were exactly equivalent.  Now I know that the terms are not necessarily the same.

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