December 2004

Tuesday, December 21, 2004

Service: * * *

Food: * * * 1/2

Ambience: * * *1/2

Babe Count: * * * *

“What’s this place actually called?” I say to the owner. The reason I’m asking is that the logo consists of a line drawing of a fork, a plate, and a knife, followed by the word ‘Cafe’. It looks like it could be ‘Oy Cafe’. Or ‘Ioy Cafe’. Or ‘Ior Cafe’.

The owner says, “Just ‘Cafe’. We like to keep it simple, like our fare.” Cafe is in 4th Ave, Melville, across the road from The Hard Times Cafe. Well worth going to. Decent menu. Fair prices. Intimate, cosy, decent ambient “Cafe Del Mar” style music playing at background level.

Joanna and I have just finished eating the butternut soup, which is delicious. Joanna is vegetarian, so she asked up front whether the soup was made using a vegetable or meat stock. Most places actually use a terrible chicken stock for their butternut, and it often has a clunky flavour at the top of the palate. The owner said, “Everything on our menu that LOOKS vegetarian IS vegetarian. So the butternut soup has absolutely no meat in it.”

“Compliments to the chef,” says Joanna.

She’s a girl I’m meeting for the first time from the internet dating site I’m on. She’s read my site, and isn’t all that fascinated with the BDSM stuff. But she’s still prepared to meet me anyway. Probably cos she’s an Aquarian, like me. Very curious people, Aquarians. I get an sms from Damon. “In Melville. Where are you?”

I send him a message back, saying, “On a date with a babe I met on the internet. Can I see you in about half an hour?”

“No prob,” he smss back. “Chilling at The Ant.”

On the dating site, her profile describes her a carrying “a few extra pounds”. When she sent me her photo, I couldn’t spot any of those pounds, and she told me in email that she’s got a very ordinary body. Well, I think I can definitely make a case against her at the Advertising Standards Authority for false advertising. She’s shapely, curvy, and delicious to look at.

We chat long and hard about polyamory. She’s had friends who tried it, and it fucked out profoundly. But in probing the setup, it seems as though these friends weren’t really doing polyamory at all. Sounds more like a communal sex situation that didn’t have many parameters set up.

An sms from Damon, “Take your time, dude.”

One back from me, “Just five or ten minutes more, ok?” He and I haven’t seen each other for ages, and I’m supposed to be at The Ant with him already. My quick coffee with Joanna has turned into several delightful hours.

I’m not trying to persuade Joanna about anything. We’d agreed upfront that this meeting would really be just a coffee meeting. A bit of an exploration. Her profile on the dating site is one of the best-written ones I’ve seen, and she sounds like a really exciting person to know. So because I’m not persuading her, we’re having a good cards-on-the-table look at what polyamory might be for me.

Now I’m totally virgin to the polyamory deal to start with, so I’m really searching for the parameters. So I really don’t have any position on it, save that it’s something I feel I need.

Then we talk about BDSM. “Why do the BDSM crowd feel the need to hang out at events?” she asks. “Surely this stuff doesn’t need labelling, doesn’t need to be put in some sort of a box?”

“Well,” I say, “maybe not. In my own case, I realise that I’ve been practicing BDSM sex pretty much from the beginning, but didn’t know that. So I didn’t label it. And I’ve had a pretty decent sex life. But,” I say, “not knowing that I was into BDSM may actually have limited my sex life quite a lot.”

Another sms flurry between me and Damon. Sheesh. He’s a patient friend.

I tell Joanna about my honouring the word ‘No’. And I explore the possibility that a girl may NEED to say ‘no’, but may equally need that ‘no’ NOT to be honoured. In vanilla sex, if a girl says ‘no’, I stop whatever I’m doing. That’s it. Now, if the ‘no’ isn’t ACTUALLY a ‘no’, and is simply the girl exercising her need to SAY ‘no’, then, the sex is NOT where it needs to be.

In BDSM, the agreement between the two parties is very explicit, and totally negotiated. The one thing that’s fairly standard in all BDSM encounters is that the word ‘no’ means nothing, and that a code word replaces it. So, in a BDSM scene, if I hear the word ‘no’, I pump up the juice a bit. However, if I hear the word ‘yellow’ (which in my negotiation with my partner means ‘Back off! I’m at the edge!’), I back off bigtime, and I find out what it is that’s pushing my partner to the edge. If I hear the word ‘red’, that’s a dead stop. That’s a nogo area, and I cease and desist immediately.

Now, of course, the code word ISN’T the be all and end all. It’s NOT a total protection for the submissive. Common sense is actually the biggie. For instance, if I hear my partner saying, “No! Roy, seriously, I mean this, we’re at my edge! Stop!” I’ll treat that as a yellow or a red, and find out what’s happening. Anything else is just brutish.

Joanna hears my thoughts, and some of it seems to make sense to her. “But why the meetings, the getting together?” she asks.

I say, “Well, there are practical aspects to BDSM that newcomers need to know. For instance, using silk scarves to tie someone up with is a no-no.”

“Why?” she asks. My guess is that she’s responding to the romantic notion that silk scarves are soft and decadent and feel delicious on the skin.

“Quite simply, the knots pull VERY tight on a silk scarf, and the scarves themselves pull very tight on the skin. They also tend to cut off circulation.” I tell her that you learn practical tips like that. “Imagine a NON-BDSM scenario,” I say, “where you and I in a vanilla setting, decide to tie one of us up. We don’t know anything about BDSM, which means we don’t know some of the ‘rules’. I tie you up with silk scarves, and neither of us knows that I’m supposed to check your circulation every five or so minutes. You don’t know that it’s NOT okay for your fingers to go numb. We’re just enjoying this edgy stuff.” I say that could be damaging, and it’s really from ignorance. BDSM gives us both a safe paradigm to operate from.”

Again, I’m not trying to persuade her about the rightness or wrongness of BDSM. I’m simply stating how it is for me at the moment. Which, I think, allows her to warm to me somewhat.

So at the end of the evening, after I’ve sent Damon about ten smss saying, “Hey dude… still on my date… seeya in about ten minutes,” Joanna and I finally get downstairs.

“A goodnight kiss,” I say, and spread my arms.

A momentary pause from her, and we clinch. Soft lips, not a chaste kiss.

“If I didn’t have a throat cold,” I say, “I’d have gone a bit further.”

“How chivalrous of you,” she says, blushing.

“Yeah,” I say, and kiss her again. She kisses me back.

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Sunday, December 19, 2004

Service: * * * *

Food: * * *

Ambience: * * * *

Babe Count: * * * *

I’ve dragged myself out of bed, and I’m having breakfast with Kathy. Ordinarily, it wouldn’t be all that difficult to get out of bed to be with Kathy. But I’ve been in bed for three days now with some kind of vicious throat infection. And today I have to go to work to catch up on stuff I missed due to being sick. Hence the difficulty in de-bedding myself.

Kathy’s cool. A delicious, buxom blonde, into light D/s (just like me!), a sub (not like me!), and into polyamory.

I’m really peeved with being out of action these past few days, cos I didn’t have to work on Thursday, and Kathy invited me to spend a day and night with her at a hideaway in Hartebeespoort. Ugh! Missed that!

Thursday morning I dozed. Until Chantal phoned to say, “Hey Roy, I’m going to see a 2 o’clock movie. Wanna join me?” She’s a buddy of mine who I do trance dances with.

“Sheesh, Chantal,” I say, “I’ve got flu, but I’ve got cabin fever. I’ll come see a movie with you.”

Now Thursday morning was quite a productive time for me. I managed to work out some stuff around polyamory, and why it’s attractive to me, and why I’ve avoided it till now. MMM, my buddy with four girlfriends, is also into poly. But his poly is a different type to my poly. He’s into polygyny, and I’m into polyamory.

Polyamory is about having multiple love partners. Polygyny is about having multiple sex partners. Might SEEM similar superficially, but they’re very very different things.

My realisation about my polyamory needs has to do with how I’ve been in relationships before. I’ve been a serial monogamist all my life. I’ve never cheated on a girlfriend. Not once. Not even to kiss another. Sure, I flirt, but nothing else. What happens to me is that I get serious tunnel vision. To the extent that I sense I may actually be slightly obsessive. I think that’s what ultimately ended my relationship with Jacqui… the fact that I was committed to being in a relationship with her without some kind of ordinary growth period. How can it be that I was fully committed, that I KNEW that this was the woman I wanted to spend the rest of my life with, without actually KNOWING her all that well first? The quick answer is that something in me NEEDED to be committed to her. Needed to be in a long-lasting relationship.

On Thursday morning, lying half asleep with a kiln in my throat, I found myself wondering about serial monogamy and why I didn’t want to join MMM and his four girlfriends with my three babes (Karen, Kathy, and Helen) for a group session over New Year. He’s very excited about this. I’m completely NOT excited by it. I’m not into group sex. I’m not into swinging. I’m not into casual sex. (Yes, it’s true I DO casual sex, but that’s simply cos I can, and there’s satisfaction of a kind in it. It’s simply not fulfilling.)

And then it comes to me. All my life I’ve yearned for family. I’ve been an outsider, a loner, someone who is majorly alienated from society. When people play happy loving couples with kids and pets, I’m genuinely puzzled. I simply don’t understand what they’re feeling. But I yearn for it.

So serial monogamy for me has been an attempt to clutch onto one person to provide that feeling of family, without the misery and hectic stuff that I experienced as a kid.

When I was five years old, my dad came home from work. I rushed up to the front door, which was made of stained glass, and the sun shone through it. He opened the door, leaned down to kiss me, and his beard prickled against my cheek. I remember the feeling: “I’m not one of them. I don’t belong here. This is not my family.” From that moment on, I was completely alone. My mom was a serious alcoholic. My dad was a weekend alcoholic. He used to lose his temper and smash things, including my mom. I don’t remember any of the events. I’ve blocked it out. What I do remember is that until I was about 15, I slept with a knife under my mattress.

So why polyamory? Simply put, it provides a sense of family, a sense of interconnectedness, a network of loving people. I’m still coming to terms with this insight, so it’ll have to remain simplistic and naive for now.

So by the time I got the call from Chantal, the cabin fever of being in bed all day was too much. And I wanted to burble my insight to someone. She’s a shaman, specialising in dance and movement through her TREAD workshops, so I thought it would be great to get out and chat.

We saw GARDEN STATE. Gets a full ten out of ten on the Roy-O-Metre. An amazing movie about family and belonging and pain. It’s one of the tightest scripts I’ve seen, and the acting is sublime. Very understated, this is a comic gem.

So Chantal and I chatted. And that was great. Getting my thinking straight. And she chatted to me about some of the stuff in her life, and I was able to listen with my own shaman’s ear, and offer my insight to her. A win-win afternoon.

That night, I took a Stilpane to sleep. It was left over from an old prescription. I don’t normally USE medication. And Stilpane is hectic shit. So one tablet just knocked me out. Friday morning was throat despair. So I smsed Doc Pete from backgammon, and asked him what I should take. “Andolex and Panado,” he smsed back. Eventually, I managed to get myself out of bed and headed for the pharmacy. Bought the Andolex and Panado and crawled back into bed. Phoned work first to tell them I wouldn’t be in. Which was when I was asked if I could come in on Sunday. “If I’m feeling better,” I said.

The Andolex only kinda half-worked, and the Panado only kinda half-worked, but Friday night passed. Saturday passed too, with me feeling feverish, and drawing quite a lot on my palmtop. And reading John Le Carre’s latest, ABSOLUTE FRIENDS. Awesome book. I love this man. He’s one of the best living writers. Him and John Irving, Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi, and Milan Kundera.

This morning arrives, and the fever and bone ache have gone. I’m sore and tired and grumpy, but fine. Still having difficulty swallowing, but hey.

The grumpiness disappears as soon as Kathy sits down. Laura, our gorgeous young waitress currently a learner in Grade Nine at the Deutsche Shule brings us menus, and we order. I’ve got to be at work at 11, and it’s 9:30 now, so there’s not much time.

So it’s banter, and catching up with Kathy, and not much more. But that’s totally cool. Cos I’m very comfortable in her company.

Let’s see where this polyamory stuff takes me. Right now, it’s time to head to the edit suite to cut episode seven of Go_Open.

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