Okay, gang — can you say 98% humidity??!!

Yes, that’s what we’ve got going on here this morning in Crazeysburg!! It’s not hot, but it’s humid.

I laid in bed for awhile, after breakfast, meditation, etc., and I drank my coffee (and I thought about sex & love & real estate) and I wondered why I was so thoroughly averse to getting on that treadmill today, until I looked at the weather app on my phone and saw that humidity index and realized – oh, that’s why. Because if I get on that treadmill in this kind of humidity, I’ll be dead in under 2 minutes! (I have no AC here to filter it out.)

I didn’t even feel like doing yoga, but I forced myself, because I’m going to spend another entire day sitting at my desk, working on the short story, and I have to at least do something physical before I sit my quite comely behind down on my desk chair for the next 9 hours! Otherwise, there will be a lot more of my behind to get comelier!!

And that said — yes, I am still hard at work on “Half-Moon Bride”! Can you believe it? It was already dark out when I closed down the laptop for the night last night, and as I sat down on my bed and wondered if I was basically coming to the end of the story, a whole other chunk of it opened up in my head!

OMG, it’s probably going to be more like a 30-page short story, at this point.  It’s insane. But I’m still loving every minute of writing it. Except that last night, as I was re-reading what I had written during the course of the day, I came upon a paragraph that was kind of really insane, and I thought: You know, Marilyn, you might want to re-think that when your brain is fresh because by any definition under the sun, that paragraph is just plain rape. The “questionable consent” aspect of that is indescribably paper thin.

So tweaking that into something a little more acceptable is the first thing on my plate for this morning!

The whole D/s thing can really cross over some lines, especially if a reader is not into D/s. (And I’ve been assured by Wikipedia, that most people in the world are not into D/s — how does Wikipedia know something like that, anyway? Have they polled everyone in the Universe??? I don’t remember them polling me. Of course, they probably didn’t have  to — they simply read everything I’ve ever written over the last 30 years and likely concluded I was one of the pathetic few who was “into” it.)

Anyway!!!!

At breakfast this morning, I was thinking about what they’d said on Wikipedia about D/s and it was sort of jarring, because I have always been into it, even as a little girl. Just always, always into it. Long before I even understood what D/s was. And then, in NYC, almost everyone I knew was into it. So I’ve just sort of taken it as a given that there is nothing weird about D/s and that it’s actually only a handful of people in the Universe who aren’t into it. To one degree or another…

But apparently the experience of my own life has left me misinformed.

I am, of course, exaggerating a bit here, but it was sort of a shocking moment– “most people” aren’t into it? Have I just been classified as part of the marginalized society? Again???? To be honest, I can’t imagine life being appealing to me any other way. (I’m talking strictly about my sexuality here, gang, in case you’re losing track of my insanity here this morning.)

In fact, on a somewhat related topic…

I saw something on Instagram that really disturbed me last night, right before I went to bed, as it turned out.  The worst time to encounter something disturbing, right? An ex-colleague of mine in Paris has a new book out. A collection of essay-memoir type pieces.

This is the woman that I had mistakenly thought was a really good friend of mine and then she absolutely ruined my last trip to Paris — on purpose. I have not spoken to her again since that trip. In fact, she was so mean to me — I’d gone there to do a book-signing in a bookstore in Paris and it was really, really important to me, and then she did her best to ruin that event for me, too. And so the very next morning, I packed my things and simply left. Took the metro out to Charles De Gaulle, put a big black “X” over Paris in my mind, removed it from my map of the world, and got on a plane to Exeter, where a really wonderful Croatian, musician-photographer friend of mine lives.

(And then Exeter’s airport was a little nightmare, because I was an American writer, flying from Paris into this tiny little airport in England and it raised all these little red flags for airport security there. Jesus. They took me out of the line and questioned me forever and looked me up on their little computer and I knew  by the non-look they had on their faces, as they questioned me over and over and over again about who I really was and why I had come to England by way of such a small airport, that they knew exactly who I was… Back then I was still dealing with an FBI issue regarding an international ring of pedophiles attaching themselves (unbeknownst to me) to my illustrious “pornography” career.)

Well, long story short, that trip was really difficult.  And as time has gone by, I have tried to wipe that woman from my memory completely, and have tried to re-embrace the idea of Paris and, you know, allow it to be on the map again. But I have, on occasion, tried to figure out what the hell was up with that woman and why she suddenly got so outrageously mean to me.

She was a well-known writer in Paris, and a financially successful one, but in her private life, she was a Dominatrix (heterosexual). I had no problem with that at all. I knew  plenty of other women who did that, all over the world, I just personally have never been into that whole scene.  Ever. It does nothing at all for me. In my opinion, that whole scene is strictly Sadomasochism and not D/s, and that’s not something I’m into.

But I have wondered if maybe she had gotten it into her head that I was a masochist, and she was trying to force me into some sort of psychological scene . I don’t know.

Then suddenly, last night, I see she’s got this new book out and what is it about? Her experiences over the last few years of basically forcing women into Sadomasochistic relationships with her and what she learned from it!!

Jesus. Just reading the PR blurb about it totally creeped me out. Fuck, you know?? For that, she had to totally ruin my trip to Paris? She couldn’t have just asked me if I’d be into it?  Of course, I would have said ‘no,’ but still. It just made me feel sick and disgusted and really just totally creeped out. No other words for it.

So, anyway. Yes, there are lines within D/s that can get murky indeed. Communication, of course, can take care of a lot of the murkiness, though. To me, D/s is a fluid, creative, emotionally-nuanced erotic exchange of power, that relies on trust and a deep sense of fun and play.  Not the rigid, pain-inducing, psychologically restrictive structure of Sadomasochism. To me, they are two totally different worlds.

Well.

For the last several mornings, upon awakening, a very specific section of Cat Stevens’ song “Moonshadow” has been playing on a relentless loop. I would wake-up, and my mind was right at the exact spot in the song as it had been for days on end. I find that stuff really interesting, but what was even more interesting, is that today I woke-up and my mind was singing an ENTIRELY different song!!!!!

Finally!!

But the song I was suddenly singing couldn’t have been more unexpected, or perhaps even more bizarre. (I have not thought of this song in probably light years. I didn’t even really realize that I actually knew it.) But I embraced it, joyfully! Because, at last, it was a new song! And I’m leaving you with it here, on this fine Saturday morning. And in the highly unlikely event that you need access to the lyrics, I have included them below. Enjoy!! Thanks for visiting, gang. I love you guys. See ya.

In Heaven There is No Beer

In heaven, there is no beer
That’s why we drink it here
And when we’re gone from here
Our friends will be drinking all our beer.

(Repeat, indefinitely)

© 1956 Ernst Neubach