Erotic intelligence stretches far beyond a repertoire of sexual techniques. It is an intelligence that celebrates curiosity and play, the power of the imagination, and our infinite fascination with what is hidden and mysterious.
As most of you are probably aware, there is a device that is sometimes installed in cars at the behest of our judicial system. This device comes into play after some incidents of someone driving while under the influence. Its purpose is simple… to prevent said someone(s) from operating their car if they are intoxicated. A relatively simple thing; the owner of the vehicle must blow into an apparatus that measures their BAC (blood alcohol content), and if the result is over a preset limit… the car won’t start.
I think this should become standard on phones.
(…)
Do I look like I’m kidding?
Drunk texting, drunk dialing, drunk chatting… Jesus, the amount of morning-after, “Oh, my fucking god!” moments we could save ourselves boggles the mind. Or how about removing not just one’s foot, but probably an entire LEG from one’s mouth because random, likely offensive, completely taken-over-by-aliens shit came pouring out after one had befriended a very agreeable bottle of vodka. Thanks, vodka!
Even better? The bright idea to call or text an ex. Because that ALWAYS goes well. It’ll end, usually, in one of two ways… a hissing, snarling attempt to verbally eviscerate each other, or waking up naked and your panties hanging from the ceiling fan, his bare ass staring you in the face. ‘Cause, you know… “I’ll leave the door open!”
Or God forbid you have a case of the lonelies… your drunk ass may find yourself sharing your number with someone you never would while sober, and then redefining embarrassment as you pour out your life’s story (copious weeping optional, but likely) to some poor schmuck who was only hoping to get laid. Not tonight, buddy! This also can happen with friends… assuming they haven’t learned not to take your calls after 5:00.
So, it makes perfect sense. Attach said device and you are prevented from worlds of inebriated disaster. In a perfect world, if I were Empress of All I Survey…
Those little bastards would be on every phone. Maybe TWICE.
You’d all thank me later.
-The Girl in the Woman
“Touch her where endlessly lost bobby-pins have tirelessly held until they didn’t. Wrap her around your hands. Replace the flowers hidden within. Brushback behind the place she’s heard a million lies.
Touch her where thoughtless last minute in place of apology jewelry used to rub her skin raw. Soothe her. Console. Renew. Trace the scars of her yesterday. Remember her birthday.
Touch her where baby oil splashed across her under the stifling Caribbean sun. Smell her adventure. Stumble around her hip bones and back dimples. She is the landscape, you the tourist.
Touch her where tequila stains her breath and sharp words spill down her chin. Drink her in. Shot for shot. Tremble under the boom and roar of her thunderstorms. Drench yourself.
Touch her where she touches herself, lost in thoughts of heavy rough messy passion. Dance. Writhe. Taste her. Wear her with pride.
Touch her mind. All of it. Dark corners and well-lit boulevards. Leave your love carved across her clavicles. Promises etched down her chest. Paint her heart a new shade of trust. Permanent.
Touch her where she demands to be touched. Obey. Submit and devour. Watch her and learn. Feel that she is both fragile and steadfast. She is poetry.”
~daily-esprit-descalier
Before You get into this great article I wanted to tell you about my own experience with DSOTM. It was the first vinyl album I ever purchased. I was fifteen at the time. I played it to death. My dad had an awesome sound system and one day I came home after school put the album on and turn the volume up to eleven. The record started, and "Speak To Me" started to play. It took about sixty seconds to blow out my dad's humungous speakers. He was furious when he got home and I was banned from using the stereo. He went out and bought new speakers. When he came home with them, he handed me a pair of headphones. (Which is a fabulous way to listen to this album.) I was in love with it from that point on. This is an amazing album. If you've never heard it. Listen to it. I've provided the link to the remastered 50th-anniversary version. Enjoy!
~M
Lately, I’ve been thinking about chaos. More specifically, I’ve been thinking about the vast interiority of a person, and how it’s impossible to fully map the terrain of oneself. Relationships and interactions are collisions of people in progress, and fully knowing another person, let alone the world at large, is an impossible order. Or, as Tolstoy put it, “A sudden, vivid awareness of the terrible opposition between something infinitely great and indefinable that was in him and something narrow and fleshy that he himself…was.”
This thing is infinitely great and indefinable—hard to articulate—but there is a pretty good representation of it, and it’s The Dark Side of the Moon.
Enough of this record’s legend has circulated in popular culture in the last fifty years, so if you’re looking for another piece on its influence on rock history, this isn’t that. It’s obviously an enormous aesthetic and technological achievement, a band at the height of their powers wielding the full weight of their medium. But the legend of Dark Side of the Moon is, in my experience, a detriment to getting to its core.
I first came to the record at age fifteen, more than thirty years after it was established as a visionary moment in the history of rock music (and t-shirt design). Indeed, in those early days, it was impossible to process Dark Side without thinking about it as an achievement. My favorite moment on the record was the final couplet, with the lyric “but the sun is eclipsed by the moon,” which to me represented the power of the album to overshadow everything in the rock music landscape. It was a celebration of itself, a victory lap, acknowledgment of a monumental artistic achievement. A moment of certainty and definition.
During a sleepless night a few weeks ago, I put the record on for the first of many listens in explicit preparation for this article. I knew I had a lot to look forward to, like Clare Torry’s cathartic vocal solo on “The Great Gig in the Sky” (still a highlight) and the genius contrast between hard rock and sensitivity on “Time.”
But the tune that got me this time around was “On the Run,” an instrumental that I used to think of as a few minutes of nothing between the album’s overture and its unprecedented middle suite of “Time,” “The Great Gig in the Sky,” and “Money.” On this listen, the literal breathlessness of “On the Run,” the footsteps, and the Doppler-like sound of the synthesizer, produced a feeling of complete disorientation. The anxiety of this instrumental communicated to me more clearly than any of the album’s lyrics did. I realized that this was the sound of the thing I had been feeling: of searching for a way to connect to oneself and, by extension, other people, but having a hard time doing so because of the fundamental disorientations of life.
“On the Run” had never felt like a part of the album’s legend. Maybe at that time, I hadn’t been through enough for it to resonate with me. The more in-your-face lyrical tracks seemed like the essence of the message, but they were also the ones that I heard on the radio and knew as defining Pink Floyd cuts. Before Dark Side of the Moon became what it was, this record was an earnest attempt to capture that elusive feeling that I still can’t name; “On the Run” was just as integral to that story as “Time” and “Eclipse.”
I should note here that “On the Run” is not exactly a subtle piece of music. The footsteps and whirring synthesizer, along with the airline announcements, make it clear that this is supposed to be an anxiety-producing piece. But through the way that the album circulated in the popular discourse, I just assumed that it was filler that didn’t add as much to the narrative as the rest of the work. But when you think of it as the center of the album, everything else begins to make a lot more sense.
The paralyzed uncertainty of “On the Run” makes the other tracks stronger. For example, it supplements “Money” by adding a referent to the instrumental interlude “Money.” As with “On the Run,” David Gilmour’s guitar work in the bridge of “Money” is intentionally disorienting, avoiding the melodic approach that makes up his signature sound. By the time you get to the end of the second guitar solo and crash back into the verse, a few things happen at once.
First, the instrumental section is in 4/4, a more traditional time signature for rock music. But the verses are in 7/4, which sounds a little off to most listeners. But because 7/4 was established earlier in the song, and 4/4 is rendered so incomprehensible by the instrumental break, 7/4 actually feels like a relief. The “normal” state of things (the part in 4/4) is humanity at its most confused and disoriented. We did something unnatural (regulated the world through commerce and greed) to wrangle that feeling of uncertainty—we opted for 7/4. Because we can’t process the mania of the guitar solo, which produces the same anxieties in us that “On the Run” does and encompasses the huge unknowability of humanity, we turn to something unnatural like Money that makes things seem normal.
Before I saw “On the Run” in this way, I thought of “Money” as an outlier on Dark Side of the Moon, a heavy-handed and predictable capitalism critique that didn’t get into the themes of madness and death that defines the record. But by focusing on the part of the record that I so often overlooked when I was focusing on its legend, I was able to see so much more in the legendary moments.
You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book... or you take a trip... and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): is the absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death. Some never awaken.
~Anaïs Nin
It’s so rare to find someone that is your “safe place” in life. Your person that you can break down in front of. Your confidant. Your place of peace. Your keeper of dreams. Your partner to dream and build with. The person who encourages you invests in yourself. The person who helps you figure out a way to accomplish things in life. The person who wakes up early or stays up late to be with you. It’s easy to feel like someone could be that, but it’s harder to find someone that actually is that. Finding people who are attractive or that turn you on or that flirt well, that’s easy. They’re everywhere. But finding someone who sticks around? Who stays? In the dark days? In the deep shit? Rare. Maybe a once or twice-in-a-lifetime thing. Hold people like that tight. Don’t let go.
~a-long-walk-home
* Stay With Me ~ Margaret Glaspy~ Devotion
* I Know It's Over ~ The Smiths ~ The Queen Is Dead
* Voices In The Sky ~ The Moody Blues ~ In Seach Of The Lost Chord
* Waterloo Sunset ~ The Kinks ~ The Anthology
* Sometimes It Snows In April ~ Prince ~ Parade
* Out On The Weekend ~ Neil Young ~ Harvest
* Love Is A Losing Game ~ Amy Winehouse ~ Back To Black
* Kiss Off ~ Violent Femmes ~ Violent Femmes
* Dream A Little Dream Of Me ~ The Mamas And Papas ~Creque Alley
* Love Minus Zero/ No Limit ~ Bob Dylan ~ 1966 Live At The Odeon, Liverpool
* America ~ Simon & Garfunkel ~ Bookends
~Love Minus Zero/ No Limit ~ Bob Dylan
My love, she speaks like silence
Without ideals or violence
She doesn't have to say she's faithful
Yet she's true, like ice, like fire
People carry roses
And make promises by the hours
My love, she laughs like the flowers
Valentines can't buy her
In the dime stores and bus stations
People talk of situations
Read books, repeat quotations
Draw conclusions on the wall
Some speak of the future
My love she speaks softly
She knows there's no success like failure
And that failure's no success at all
The cloak and dagger dangles
Madams light the candles
In ceremonies of the horsemen
Even the pawn must hold a grudge
Statues made of matchsticks
Crumble into one another
My love winks, she does not bother
She knows too much to argue or to judge
The bridge at midnight trembles
The country doctor rambles
Bankers' nieces seek perfection
Expecting all the gifts that wise men bring
The wind howls like a hammer
The night blows rainy
My love, she's like some raven
At my window with a broken wing
**On Goodbyes
“The reason it hurts so much to separate is that our souls are connected. Maybe they always have been and will be. Maybe we've lived a thousand lives before this one and in each of them we've found each other. And maybe each time, we've been forced apart for the same reasons. That means that this goodbye is both a goodbye for the past ten thousand years and a prelude to what will come.”
― Nicholas Sparks, The Notebook
Most everyone has experienced at least one heart-wrenching relationship that ended too soon or not soon enough. That left them deeply aching in the center of their chest where a loving, beating, beautiful unscathed heart used to rest. Days pass and there are tears. There are regrets and the red flags come marching, parading thru your nightmares like a knife. You wake in a lovely haze forgetting for mere moments that you are still broken. That you are alone. That your heart is so mangled with the trauma that there's no inconceivable way it's ever going be ok....then it so cruelly comes rushing back. Flooded by feelings over again.
Days pass and even more... and sometimes it's years. It becomes easier to close yourself off and quietly pack away the remains of your heart than even bear the thought of opening it back to someone. People come. People leave and it isn't even like you're trying to disguise the lack of complete feeling you've been left with. The numbness and they see it. They see it in your eyes and you know they see it. They hear it in your voice. They ask if you're ok and you say yes, but they know...
This is how some people stay. They get lost in it. Settle into it, like a new skin. Consumed by it. They mourn it, crawl around in it while taking every single painful memory in their hands...trying to reshape it. Make sense of it. Until they realize there's no sense to be made.
And then they wake from this hibernation. To rejoin the living. They decide to fight for themselves. To take back what was taken. They practice self-care and they eat. They drink water. They pray and meditate and they are gentle with their body. They show grace and forgiveness to themselves. Of their choices. They mend friendships. They find a hobby. They write. They sunbathe just to feel the sun on their skin. They drive without destinations. They laugh. They do the things they once loved and stopped doing for someone else. Realizing in retrospect they emptied so much of their soul out into someone that was never going to be full until they, were completely and utterly empty.
You press on. If only in the motions. Heart memory is like muscle memory...It quickly starts to remember. Your heart starts to feel. To beat steadily. If only you let it. It starts to love again. Not someone else, but for the sheer hope of happiness, peace, and light filling your days again. You find a renewed love for the simplistic and mundane.
Then somehow after that time. that pain. the "my heart will never be able to go thru that again" it forgets. Or forgives. It fades. You find it open to every possibility. It doesn't scare the fuck out of you anymore. The closeness, Openness. Bearing your soul. The possibility of another heartbreak. It is resilient. The heart is the most resilient creature and the most fragile, but most of it's built for love. It will always be built for love.
~her-reconciled-heart
When of the best parts of a D/s relationship is just reaching out and grabbing someone. the hair, ass, hip, or hand; roughly or sweet and soft: any and all options are perfect because you get that little startled reaction that turns into a smile as they stumble into being pressed against you. And when you kiss them afterward… Slow and sensual? Hard and needy? A little gentle kiss on the tip of the nose or forehead or the sort of kissing that leaves them moaning and grinding into your thigh? It doesn’t matter what kind of kiss it is. The treasure is that smile you get afterward, and the look in their eye telling you they’re yours.
It's been too long...
~lovethythrall
..
The hardest thing I’ve ever done is His mirror scenes and body image training.
Fuck, I’d rather light myself on fire!
The first set of instructions is a comprehensive written list of all the parts of my body I currently “hate” with details about when it’s the worst (position) or intrudes into my focus. And then I have to give Him the list. He spends days with the list. Asks more questions.
Then comes the instructions for training day.
Forced to look, listen, experience…
To endure grabbing, pulling, and squeezing parts that life, aging, and gravity have been less than kind to. To see all those parts from every angle. To not be allowed to look away, not a moment’s respite.
Once the sobbing subsides a bit, He describes what He sees, showing me the curves He focuses on, the sensations He feels.
He takes His pleasure in every form imaginable while I watch. The mirrors not only show him me, but His pleasure, His undeniable lust, even while grabbing and enjoying the parts I hate. (I’m an evidence-based kinda girl.)
There is an overriding theme, a mantra...
“I am perfect for Him.” That I am never more beautiful than when I’m on my knees or in the moment I have surrendered my being to His to receive the gift of erotic pain or am put to use pleasing Him.
A quote from Him: “Little one I refuse to fucking compete. I will have you, you will give me your complete surrender and focus. I will not abide a competitor. And right now, I’m competing with your inner critic. We will do this as many times as it takes. I will break this distraction and have your complete focus. I will not accept competition.”
And in the end, I am broken and he remakes me. Remakes me to come before Him truly “naked and unashamed.”
@submissive-seeking
