Wednesday, September 16, 2009

"What's In It For You?"

I've heard that question more than once. The first time was in May of 2008 following the Romp in Central Park. I was standing on a tiny yoga mat in my stall and could not move much. The problem was the floor. It was hardwood and new. That meant it was not only easily marked up by my hooves, but also slippery in a way that would ensure a quick meeting with my butt in a very painful manner if I moved.

So I guess I shouldn't have been surprised when, standing there all dressed up with nowhere to go, the question of what was in this for me surfaced.

At other times, the question has arisen spontaneously. Most recently, it came up during a camping weekend sponsored by Northern Maine Kinksters. Mistress, Stormy and our new stable girl Jen had come up for the event and we spent two days doing no holds barred pony play. I'll tell you more about that soon. But again, someone asked what I got out of this pastime.

It's a good question and I have spent some serious time thinking about it. I know I have written about the why of pony play from my own perspective (it's the only perspective I've got, after all). But I have tended to focus mostly on why I do things rather than what I get out of them. Sound like the same thing? Not so fast.

Deciding why I do what I do implies some degree of forethought - as though the need to rationalize my way into something is inherent in the decision. Perhaps it is, I don't know. Rationale has little to do with submitting my back for a striping or my backside for a righteous whacking with a crop. But whatever.

So what do I get out of this? How about the continued effect that the 'fetish fitness program' as Mistress calls it has had on my health and physical well being. I'm not fond of going to the gym but I do it regularly. Because I do it to be a better pony, I consider gym time to be an act of submission to my Mistress and a way of fulfilling the promises I have made to her. I enjoy my hikes and don't need a reason to do them. My weight is down, my muscle is up and I feel great despite the health problems I have had this year. So I guess you could say I get better health out of being a pony.

But you can get that out of a lot of activities and for lots of reasons. You don't need to enter an altered state of consciousness or have the blood brought to the surface of your skin to attain the glow of good health. It's a nice byproduct of pony play, but it isn't the impetus that keeps me here.

What I truly get out of it - what's in it for me - is something that I discovered only after I had plunged in. It may sound a bit corny to the jaded, but it's true. What I get out of pony play can be summarized in two words.

Human touch.

Ok. This is going to sound sad to some but bear with me.

I live alone. I have lived alone for over thirty years. At the age of 50, I measure the time between intimate (read 'sexual') contacts with others in years. But at the age of 50, I feel differently about that than I did a couple decades ago. It's the way things are. So it's no surprise that I grab on to Mistress and Stormy when I get the chance. It's always an incredible pleasure to see them coming. And it's very sad when I have to watch them leave. Making the time and creating the circumstances for contact takes some effort.

Perhaps pony play is a wild construct for something like this, but one blogger saw the intimate relationship that exists between me and my Mistress when we were working together at the 2008 Winter Flea, so I know it's real.

What's also real is the increasing fondness I have for Stormy. We spend a fair amount of time on the phone keeping up with each others lives. We delight in each others company and do just about everything together when we make time to be together. At Camp Crucible this year, we were nicknamed 'The Bookends'.

You don't get this just anywhere. It's the soothing embrace of my Mistress after a good dungeon session that brings tears to my eyes. It's the gentle wash down after working so very hard for whomever is handling me during a pony session. it's the care and feeding that I get when I am a beast of burden.

It's the constant discuvery of a self that I never knew existed and by which I am constantly fascinated.

And it's the words, "I love you," spoken by someone I love - and didn't know before this.

That's what's in this for me.

Monday, September 14, 2009

The Year That Was

I guess things can conspire to sidetrack anyone no matter how determined they may be. I have gotten several emails over the past few months from people who follow this blog asking me when I would be posting again. I started the CTK stories back in January. Following my usual pattern, they should have been finished a long time ago. I have stories backed up - well, a couple of them anyway - that I will get posted soon enough. But for those of you who had to wait long periods of time for your fix, my sincere apologies.

By way of a brief explanation, I offer the following. I will keep details to a minimum, but here is what 2009 has looked like to me so far:

New Year's Eve - traveled to Massachusetts with a horrible toothache. Visited the dentist on my return. Result; one root canal and one crown. What a nice start to the year. This was probably caused in part by my bit - or more precisely, by the way I often pushed my bit onto my front teeth so I could clean the drool off of it. That may have loosened the crown that had lived there for 22 years without trouble. Decided to look into a new bit made for human ponies. I found a nice one and will tell you about it soon.

February 6, 2009: Remember that kidney stone I had in the first part of My Kinky Texas Adventure? I awoke with another one at 4 a.m. this morning. Tried to man up and let it run its course without a trip to the emergency room. Three hours later, it was no use. Called the ambulance and took a ride. The PA who saw me went berserk when he saw my CT scans from six frikin' months ago. Seems I didn't have little stones that move along once in a while. It turned out that I had monster stones in both kidneys that were dropping the occasional piece off. The stone on the left side was 14 mm in diameter and about to cause big problems - at least, that was the case six months before! Nobody seemed at all worried about it then. They should have been.

This discovery precipitated three surgical procedures and one flaming kidney infection before it was over. By then, it was late July. And it isn't over exactly. I still have one stone in the right kidney, but that one will only come out if they drill a hole in my back and I'm not up for that at this point. Enough for one year.

Add to all of this a busy summer schedule, work, and my continuing efforts to acquire a business and, well, that makes for a pretty full plate. It's not that I couldn't scratch out the time to write, it's that I couldn't get into the right frame of mind. There were too many other concerns tugging at me. And believe me, this was a very short synopsis.

There is more to come. We attended the Winter Flea again this year. Stormy and I went to Camp again - without our beloved Mistress who could not make it this year. We marched in the Boston Pride Parade just before summer became a sodden mess, and now here we are. I am just back from a two-day camping trip with Mistress, Stormy and our new stable girl Jen. So there are stories to tell.

I'll be doing that very soon.

I'm fine. Really.

Sunday, September 13, 2009

My Kinky Texas Adventure - Part 4

Wow. This is the story that just won't write itself! Apologies to Clover for the long wait. But this is the final installment. I have new stories to tell and they really will be appearing soon.

As I said earlier, the CTK Jamboree was an intense event. There were games and competitions, meals, socializing and generally a lot of energy going constantly all weekend long. When more than 20 people cram into a house and get this active with each other, things are bound to happen. There are those moments of personal triumph and failure. That shouldn't surprise anyone.

I had both types of experiences, but they still took me by surprise.

Probably the greatest anxiety for me was the dressage event. For the uninitiated, dressage is the art of training a horse in precision of movement and discipline. It's easy to see how this would adapt well to the scene.

Mistress has been training Stormy and I to a system of wordless crop commands. The idea is for us to work off reins using sight cues. Because we had been at this for a while, Mistress felt that we should enter in the advanced class. To Her, it is far better to crash and burn in the advanced competition than to prevail as a beginner when, in fact, you are not a beginner. So we signed up for the advanced dressage competition. This meant no verbal communication, a more complicated pattern, and more compulsory gaits.

The anxiety came from the fact that the ponies were not allowed to see the pattern before the test. That is quite normal in these situations, so there was no argument on that point. It's just one of those things that will cause no problem for some and drive others up the wall. I landed somewhere in between. I knew our system and felt prepared to do as I was told by the signals. Still, the element of not knowing what was coming - ordinarily such a turn-on for me - was filling me with the desire to get it over with. Probably that's why I decided to go first when Mistress gave me the option. It's kind of odd, but Stormy and I sort of switched roles on this. Where he had been rather cagey about the dressage event and I more calm at first, now that the time had come, I was the jittery one. Perhaps it had something to do with the comment that Mistress had made after studying the pattern.

"There's one place where a pony's brain might explode, but then we will have a pony brain to play with!"

Ok, let's do this in good fun.

There were ponies in line ahead of me and I did the right thing by not watching out the kitchen window, which afforded a nice view of the dressage ring. I waited patiently and as calmly as I could. When my turn came, I walked out calmly and awaited my first signal from Mistress.

We began our test with a trot to center and a bow to the judges. Then the test began. I did the very best I could and tried very hard to make Mistress proud of me. I went off pattern once when I failed to understand one signal, and I might have turned in the wrong direction at another point, but overall, I thought I had done well. Nothing special, but well for a first time competitor.

When the ribbons were awarded I discovered to my shock and amazement that I had not only done well, I had taken Reserve Champion. For those unfamiliar with these things, that means second place. Foxy Davis' Firefox had taken Champion. What an honor to come so close and be surpassed only by such an accomplished ponygirl.

That was the victory for me. There would also be humbling experiences later on.

Mistress had spent some time working me to the carts before the events started. That was one advantage to arriving a couple days early. Stormy is a champion in cart work, taking Grand Champion at Floating World for a blindfolded cart pulling routing that Mistress had put together for him. We sort of figured he would do well on this, so Mistress spent extra time with me as I had so little experience with carts and blindfolds.

Strangely, the idea of pulling a cart while blindfolded didn't scare me at all. Not only did I feel capable and ready to have a go at it - my practice session having gone quite well, thank you), but I even felt comfortable. I wasn't nervous at all.

Never mind that I had not seen the course. Why would I need to see a course I was going to be driven through blindfolded?

Perhaps I should have taken a cue from the reluctance all the other ponies showed when the ring steward asked who wanted to go first. But when nobody spoke up, I jumped right in. Mistress was agreeable, so off we went.

I wanted to do this at speed. I really wanted to trot my way through this course, and after the practice session I had had a couple days before, I saw no reason why that wouldn't be possible. But very soon after leaving the starting line, I discovered just how disorienting it could be to have a blindfold on. Now, I wasn't new to them, and I had learned to get over my fear of them at our little training spot in Derry, NH. But in this strange field (or strange to me, anyway) down in Texas, nothing seemed to make any sense.

Really, that's the nub of the problem. A pony wearing a blindfold should never try to make sense of anything. He should just listen to the reins and trust his handler. But I guess I was still trying to map out the field in my own head while figuring out where Mistress wanted me to go. It was a mistake.

I did reasonably well through most of the course, managing to get Mistress close enough to the flags that She was supposed to grab as we went by. But at one point, I was reined to a halt and given a signal to back up. In the process, I also got a signal to turn. That's a tricky maneuver that bio-horses don't usually have to worry about, but here I was faced with it.

I turned as I was instructed - or rather, as I thought I had been instructed. But almost immediately, I was halted again and reined forward. One more signal to stop, back up and turn again led to a quick halt and a rein forward. Mistress tried a third time and again, I could not seem to do the right thing.

By this moment, I was unhappy. Unhappy that I was not getting the job done and unhappy that the clock was running (like that was my worry or something). In short order, frustration began to mount and I started to get angry with myself.

That's never a good thing, anger. It makes you do irrational things, and irrational things are even easier to do when you are blindfolded. Your brain starts to make up all sorts of stories about how much of a fool you look and how many are watching. Coupled with a desire to do well, you can find yourself in a vicious cycle until something gives.

In this case, something gave rather spectacularly. When I got yet another rein signal to move forward, I moved ahead about three steps and straight into a hay bale. That sent me ass over tea kettle into the dirt.

And that did it. One wall coming up, and I hit it hard. I said something that I won't repeat here - goodbye head space - and threw a handful of dirt at the ground. Mistress called out to the ring steward that we were done and would not complete the course. That stung more than the fall because I wanted to finish this cursed course and show it that it could not defeat me. I wanted everyone to know that I would get the job done no matter how many bruises it cost me. Mistress unhitched me from the cart and sent me to the pony pen where my anger was readily apparent to the rest of the ponies waiting their turn. Another bad move on my part.

Firefox came over to me and told me how brave I had been to go first and that even though I didn't finish the course, I had dome very well. All I could do was remind her that I had failed to finish. When it was clear to her that the message wasn't getting through, Firefox grabbed my bridle and said, "Hey! I'm trying to make you feel better!"

One case of perspective coming up. I stopped dead in my tracks and thanked her. Then she gave me a hug.

Still, I felt I had disappointed Mistress and that stung enough to bring tears. I stepped into the pony trailer where I could be alone for a few minutes and let them flow. It proved good therapy, and once finished, I looked out through the slats in the trailer to see Stormy starting into the course with Mistress at the reins. He seemed to have some trouble at some of the same points I did, but he finished the course in one piece. I came out of the trailer to see him, but he had already headed to the house for some reason.

I found him in our room. As it turned out, he had also hit his own personal wall. We talked about it and spent some time going over what had happened with each of us. When Mistress joined us, we had some private time together to talk about what had happened to each of us. It was one of those deeply private moments, and I won't go into any detail, but one thing I did carry away from it was that I had not disappointed Mistress at all. She knew me a little better than I knew myself on this score. When She saw how upset I was, She elected to stop even though She knew I would have gone further. But She also realized that if I had had any further trouble - almost a certainty given my level of frustration - things would have been much worse. I had to agree. She was right. It was better to take it on the chin and stop with dignity intact than to break down completely.

I got an honorable mention for the blindfold cart challenge even though I didn't finish the course. That was a surprise to me, and helped put me back on track. After all, there was still more to go. The weekend was nearing its close, and it had been very intense. Stormy and I both had issues to deal with, and with the help of our Mistress, we came through it.

And though it may embarrass him, you should know that Stormy took the Champion ribbon in the blindfold cart challenge.

The evening event was Freestyle Dressage. In this event, ponies and handlers put on dressage presentations that they had rehearsed. Mistress created another tandem dressage routine for Stormy and I again using Her crop signals instead of reins or verbal commands. Others put on their own presentations and there was some serious creativity at work here. In the end, Mistress took home the Third Place ribbon for Her work with us. Not at all bad for a first time out!

There were two final events that made the weekend complete for me. Neither of them was a competition. One was a collaring, the other a wedding.

A collaring is a ceremony in which a Dominant takes ownership of a submissive. In the pony world, it might better be called a bridling. I had mine at the 2008 Winter Flea (that story is told in an earlier entry on this blog). But this would be special to three people - Mistress, me, and Stormy.

Stormy was originally owned and trained by E.R. of the Equus Eroticus Ranch. When she and her husband Paul Reed moved to Texas, it became difficult for Stormy to get the time to go visit for training and such. They had made a wonderful video on human pony training (which is still available, by the way), but visits became very rare, and Ms. R began to transition out of the scene. Stormy met Mistress at camp Crucible and at just about the time that his interest in pony play was reaching a crossroads. The chemistry between them was good, though, and he asked Her if She would mind taking up his training. Mistress agreed, and arrangements were made with Ms. R. There were attempts to get a long-term lease from the EE Ranch, but the proprietors were unable to make it to Camp in the years that followed. So it seemed a great idea to get it done at CTK. After all, the EE Ranch wasn't all that far away.

So it was that Paul Reed arrived with the lease in hand. Stormy would belong to Aphrodite's Meadow Stable on a 99-year lease for the price of one American dollar. The deal done, Mistress presented Stormy with his stable collar - the exact same colors as mine - and placed it on him. That made Stormy an official pony of Aphrodite's Meadow. It also made him my stable mate in earnest. It was one of the most moving moments of my year.

The wedding joined Foxy Davis and Sherifox in a midnight ceremony. Although it was cold outside, everybody basked in the warmth of the glow between the two of them. The vows were down to Earth and so sincere. Everyone who attended joined in congratulating the newlyweds and celebrating the special moment.

The week had been long and the games well played, but as with all of these events, it had to come to a close soon enough. Mistress, Stormy and I were taken to the airport on Monday morning for our flight back. I was happy to know that I could get a seat on the flight that the two of them were scheduled to take. Originally, I had to fly out on a different plane and sit in Minneapolis (I think) for five hours. Not a happy thought for me, so it was worth the additional $50 to get on the plane headed for Atlanta instead. We made it that far as a threesome before Stormy had to switch for a plane to Hartford. Mistress and I continued on to Boston, and the trip finally came to an end.

It was good to be home. I had played hard, hit some walls, and learned a lot about myself as a pony. I learned a lot about my abilities and limitations. Now I have some limits to stretch.

No doubt Mistress will help all She can.