Angst | Coyote Too

Dominance: What Draws, What Intimidates

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 00:17:12 -0500

Several weeks ago Mollena (@Mollena) asked me several questions on FormSpring. I finally got around to answering them (in other words, I was desperately avoiding doing taxes) and I thought two of them might be worth posting here. I've done a little minor editing, but if you read what I wrote on FormSpring, you've seen these already.

What intimidates you about dominance? by Mollena

Responsibility. I've yet to play on a casual basis, although I would like to (oddly, that requires more confidence, more on that in a second). My play has been in the context of relationships with at least some level of commitment, and that commitment as a Dom has meant that I have a great deal of responsibility for the emotional well-being of my partner. In many ways, that's an incredibly egotistic thing to take on, and it is something that scares me every day. It's bad enough to start a vanilla relationship and worry about whether you really love them, whether it will fall apart, how it will impact them.…

Daddy/little girl - A Brief Comment

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 13:02:35 -0500

@badbadgirlx recently posted a sexting story in response to @CelticFrog's latest MicroFantasy Monday Phrase. A lot of her blog followers are used to more vanilla posts, and someone got a little freaked at her use of "Daddy" and "little girl" in the story. Not really surprising.

I commented on it on her blog, but I wanted to carry that over here, because my (admittedly very hurried) Google search didn't turn up anything more definitive, and I'd like to see if anyone had any pointers to good (preferably short and to the point) articles that cover these sorts of issues when they come up.

In the meantime, here was my take on it, as posted in her comments section.

@Daddy: Daddy/little girl is not about incest, or often even about "age play". It's usually more about the the emotions those words elicit in a relationship. The couple may be trying to invoke the helplessness/trust/misbehavior of a "little girl" and the power/protection/correction of a "Daddy". Those are the words we use in our…

The kids are home, where am I?

Sat, 19 Dec 2009 14:34:18 -0500

It's been almost a year since I moved out. The kids have been home from boarding school for March vacation, the summer, Thanksgiving, and now it's their three week Christmas vacation. W and I are separated, and I just have a place in a group house in the next town over. She's in our old house still, and that's where they stay, that's where their friends are, and that's the only home they remember. Since Thanksgiving I've finally started making my apartment my own space, even though that has meant taking some of my things out of W's house. The holes left by what I take hurt me, but most was from my home office, and now a little bit from my library there. I worry about what the kids will think when they see the holes I've left behind. I even worry about my in-laws, who have been living there since last May (stuck here waiting for a citizenship application to go through (it did!) and afraid to return to Iran with the current unrest and suspicion there against Iranian's traveling to the…

How do you punish a Master?

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 14:11:34 -0500

D/s culture replete with ways to punish a submissive, but what happens when the Master goes astray and hurts the submissive? Who punishes him?

The answer is quite simple. The Master punishes himself.

Whether the relationship is for a single scene or a life time. Whether it takes place in a club, a bedroom, or across the internet. Whether it's for show, for play, or fundamental Need. No matter what the time, the setting, or the reason; the Master took on a responsibility to care for the submissive. Her well-being becomes not just his responsibility, it becomes his well-being. Just as her pleasure becomes his pleasure, so her pain becomes his pain. You cannot have one without the other. So long as the relationship exists, the two are bound, not just together, but within each other. Pleasure and pain. Trust and responsibility. Master and submissive. One being.

When the Master screws up, both feel the pain. The submissive understands pain. So long as Trust remains, she has an outlet; she…

Why Coyote?

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 17:04:30 -0500

I've been asked a number of times why I chose Coyote as my online identity/avatar/totem. The answer is very clear in my mind, but not so easy to express to those who aren't familiar with Coyote. I read (and occasionally heard) Coyote tales at a young age. In college I studied the broader Trickster motifs as well. Then for many years they lay dormant in my mind, until I reached a time when I needed to change who I was.

Coyote resonates within me; with where I am in my life. I first realized it a little over a year ago, when I was reading a number of stories and books by Charles de Lint. Coyote wanders in and out of de Lint stories, just as he meanders through "traditional" folk stories. I went back and re-read the earlier Coyote tales I knew, and I realized that I identified with Coyote's constant desire to get involved and fix things, and his equally common failure to get it right. That's not surprising, because Coyote is really a representation of what it means to be human; sometimes…

Pandora: For a Friend

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:51:57 -0500

I wrote this for a friend who keeps stopping short of exploring her creativity, because she fears the joy will be short-lived; cut down by the mundane process of selling, lack of appreciation, inability to find those who will share her interests, or a simple lack of time. At the core, she feels it is safer to stay unfulfilled, than to experience joy that might be lost and never regained—and that is a fear that we have all experienced at one time or another. She likened it to the fear of opening Pandora's Box.

You hesitate to open the jar, because you fear that the pleasure will be fleeting, that it will not lead to new discoveries and new pleasures. But Pandora's jar did not hold all evil, and not all that was good, escaped.

"Only Hope remained there in an unbreakable home within under the rim of the great jar, and did not fly out at the door; for ere that, the lid of the jar stopped her, by the will of Aegis-holding Zeus who gathers the clouds." (Hesiod, Works and Days)

Hope is what…

Need

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 20:45:52 -0500

For most of my life I have believed that Love was the most powerful emotion, and Orgasm the most intense pleasure. I no longer believe either of those things.

Over the past nine months (the rebirth metaphor does not escape me), I have discovered feelings and sensations that I had no idea even existed. My entire concept of what my mind and body are capable of has been turned upside down. Somewhere inside of me, something must have known, because I have always longed for certain situations. I wondered what it would be like to be the Dominant one, to have a strong submissive, someone whose life during the day was stressful and demanding. She was smart, she was successful, but when she came home she wanted to let it all go and let someone else take control. I knew a little about that release, I had played a bit many years ago. I knew the relaxation that could come with submission, and as I fantasized, I felt a tingle of the thrill that might come with being the Dominant. Somewhere, my…

Lucky Man

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 13:32:25 -0500

If there's one thing my roadtrip has done, it's remind me of how lucky I am. It's not a time of my life when I feel particularly lucky, but I when I stop and think about it rationally, I've had a very fortunate life. I was at the right place at the right time at several key moments in my life, which led to a career which I have loved. I found a partner who, while we ran into a lot of (eventually terminal) issues between us, was in many ways the perfect yin to my yang. The result was a great home, and joint parenting which produced two bright, creative (and even fairly organized :-) kids whom I'm immensely proud of. We created something better than ourselves.

When I get depressed about where things are now, I try to remember that many of my friends never had those chances, or only got there after a great deal of pain and hard work. When I look at the house, and all the things we did together, I remind myself that while the future we tried to build is lost, I learned a great deal and…

Being Coyote

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 21:09:28 -0400

My aunt has been helping my father finish an auto-biography he is self-publishing. Part of the work has involved going through the bulletins he sent to his extended family (green carbons ☺) every few weeks or months. She recently stumbled across the following paragraph, written about myself when I was seven years old. Knowing as she does, my Coyote persona, she forwarded it to me.

Monday evening the 16th, we celebrated my birthday. The greatest present was a “plaque” from [my-name], done a while back but really great! The execution was by hammering a screwdriver with the hammer to make a design, on a piece of clapboard. The design –– his own, and colored appropriately with watercolors, shows a wolf (or coyote) trotting along a hilly skyline of brown desert, trying to reach a lower right-hand-corner water-hole, escorted by circling buzzards who don’t think he’ll make it to the water-hole, while the sun is going down behind the hills!

It was a coyote, I remember making it, and I…

Books

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 00:14:49 -0400

Five or six years ago we had a fire. It took out my home office and scorched most of the library. The microwave in the kitchen melted. But all things considered, we were very lucky. We weren't there (a halogen lamp on a timer had apparently had some paper fall on it from a bookcase). We had to gut the inside of the house, but we only lost about a third of the contents. And everything was there to inventory—it took the insurance company four days, but they made a 100 page spreadsheet of everything in the house. While they were doing that, I hired a friend to help me, and we went through the books.

The top bookshelves were massively charred, but we tore off the covers and read the titles from the inside, so for the first time I had a full list of all the books that I (had) owned. The bottom three or four shelves were salvagable, and I saved some books that were burnt anyway, like two complete first American editions of the Lord of the Rings :-(. I haven't had time though, to go through…

I'm Still Here :-)

Wed, 11 Feb 2009 21:47:31 -0500

Since I threw this site up, posted a bunch of stuff, and suddenly stopped, I didn't want anyone to think it was a one-shot thing. I'm still here, and I'm still planning to write much more. There's just been a lot going on, ranging from telling the kids that my wife and I have separated, to exploring a possible new job, to having some stupid viral bronchitis that's taking me a week to clear up. Stay tuned, and thanks for listening.

Of Dreams and Snowflakes

Mon, 26 Jan 2009 10:54:57 -0500

Dreams are certainly odd things. My mother believes they can foretell the future, and indeed when I was young, I was certain she was magic, because things would happen, and she would say she had seen them in a dream. Later I wondered more about cause and effect, and I learned from my own experience that dreams aren't the only odd thing, memories can be strange as well. They warp, they change over time. Things remembered often become more real, more rational. Other memories drift away in the dust on the edge of our road.

It could well be that dreams are nothing more than nighttime sensations which our mind interprets as memories. They have no form until the brain shapes them into something which we can recognize. We've all felt some pieces of a dream fade as we seek to remember, while others, even if they seem less important, become more concrete just because they are more like real life.

In the end, like all stories, it is not the truth of the tale which really matters—it is what the…

It's Been a Year

Sun, 25 Jan 2009 18:44:41 -0500

A year ago I told my wife that trying to get our relationship back to normal by taking small steps just wasn't working. We had to dive in fully committed and act like we were a happily married couple, instead of trying the "if you do this, then that will make me happier and maybe I'll do that" approach that had failed so often in the past. She agreed to try it, and we had a pleasant evening together. The next few days were nice, but soon we were back to business as usual. Several weeks later, with no progress made, she said she just couldn't do it, and I said I'd run out of ideas. After almost twenty years of trying to make things work, I simply couldn't think of anything else we could do to get back what we had before we got married. I'd spent the first years of our marriage being oblivious to what was wrong, and the rest surviving on the hope that we could fix things. Without the hope, I couldn't go on.

A lot of things have happened over the past year year. We agreed to separate…