The thoughts and experiences of a person in the BDSM scene

It’s funny how things work out sometimes.  I recently found out that a friend of mine, whom I previously thought was completely vanilla, is actually as kinky as I am, if not kinkier.  Pretty neat.  That led to a discussion as we were driving down the road about what things we have done before and were into, and it turns out that they have a small collection of stuff that they use for BDSM.  However, my friend had never been on FetLife before or knew much about the public scene.  They knew of the existence of The Crucible, but other than that, I knew far more about the public scene than they did.

One thing that we discussed was how we keep our rope.  Turns out that my friend keeps their rope the way that I used to do when I had just started out in BDSM: grab one end in one hand, and wrap it between hand and elbow until you’ve got about a foot or so on each end, change directions, and then tie it off.  The downside to this, especially with kinkier rope (as in rope that tends to kink up a bit), is that it’s easy for things to get tangled when it’s time to take it all apart.  Nothing like having to sit there and untangle rope at the beginning of a scene.  I’d dare say that no one likes to start a scene annoyed about tangled rope, after all, but it was the only way I knew.  I stopped using this method when I was at a play party at someone’s house a few months ago and learned a better way to keep my rope when it’s not in use.

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A play session that I had yesterday at a friend’s house should be a lesson as to what not to do when playing with rope.  Short of it is that I had a bit of bad pain in the middle of a scene, and it was my own stupid fault.

When this particular friend and I play, we switch, and we service-top for each other.  In those scenes, the top plays with the bottom per the bottom’s desires, and checks in to make sure that they are good to go and are otherwise enjoying it.  The first scene, where I was the top, went very well, with simple ropework and a lot of playing.

My scene, on the other hand, didn’t go too well.  I like a lot of bondage, and I was thinking about how I wanted to be tied this time.  Usually, this comes naturally, but I was a bit stumped on what I wanted to do this time.  What I ended up deciding on was a frogtie and arms behind my back.  For this, we used my 15′ lengths of rope, and tied everything using a double-rope style.  I usually tie my own legs, since I kind of enjoy tying myself up (as much as I can, at least).  Then my friend tied my wrists together behind my back.  After that, we added a blindfold and a gag, I rolled over onto my back, and then it was off to the races.

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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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