This has, it seems, been the year of reacquaintanceship.

Early this year, I spoke for the first time in almost two decades with a very old, and at one time very dear, friend and lover. She had been my first lover, in fact, but time and tide carried us in different directions, and we both went out to meet our lives, and lost track of one another.

It was a happy, but not long-lasting, reunion; it seems her current lover doesn’t approve of her associating with me. Old flames are dangerous things, and all that.

Anyway, shortly after, I received a surprise phone call from another very old friend, a person who was my best friend in our high-school days, and with whom I had not spoken for some twelve years. She had been married, and had gone on to I didn’t know where, and we had fallen out of touch.

Turns out she was living not far down the road from me. We’d both moved many times in the intervening decade, but not so far as all that; we have since renewed our friendship, and have had great fun talking about our younger and more foolish selves.

Midweek, my wife received a phone call from yet another old friend, a person we last saw in 1992, some eleven years ago. He had at that time been part of a close circle of friends my wife and I held in common, which is now scattered (and with some animosity; some things happened, many of which were quite ugly and all of which were completely avoidable had we all taken more care).

“So,” he said, “I had just got to thinking about you…”

The saying goes that with clothes, new are best, and with friends, old are best. I don’t know that that’s always true; there are some people come recently in my life that I would not necessarily put below those I have known for years. Nevertheless, I think a toast to old friends is in order.

So I’ve been continuing to talk to L., who calls me her “Internet boy-toy” and introduced me to the wonders of phone sex–two minds and two voices and the power of imagination.

Today we talked about my relationship with my wife. My wife, of course, has always known about my dealings (or whatever one wishes to call them) with L., and L. broached the idea of talking to my wife directly–something she had never done.

She seemed a little unsure at first; if you are not accustomed to this sort of thing, what do you say to your lover’s spouse, even if your “lover” is only virtual?

She need not have bee concerned, of course. My wife is a genuinely warm and wonderful person, and she has no thought of care or dismay at the prospect of sharing my attentions, provided she is sharing them with the right person. The three of us were soon talking easily.

A bit too easily, I fear. For it soon came to pass that L. had some evil and devious ideas to share with my wife, and wished to do this thing without my eavesdropping.

L. is possessed of one of the finest and most imaginatively evil and cruel minds I have encountered in many years. Her creativity and her delicious evil are things to be marvelled at: “Now take a rubber band and two raw eggs…”

The two are conspiring even as I speak. Occasionally, I hear my wife laughing in the room upstairs.

I am very, very afraid.

One very long, hard week down; one very long, hard week to go. It’s been crazy…I’ve been working so much this past week I’ve barely had time to do anything else at all (including such basic things as reading my email), and now, anther long week is looming ahead. Perhaps things will start to slow down later in the week, but for now, I’m still trying to figure out how to survive…

In any event, it’s been a somewhat dreary day. Didn’t get to see the secondary girlfriend this week, as she has a cold, and didn’t get to do the photo shoot I had scheduled today either, as the model ended up with last-minute family commitments.

Oh, well. Maybe the next week will be a bit better.

I am SUCH a slut.

It seems I’ve fallen into the role of “Internet boy-toy.” I’m not quite sure how it happened.

There is this person–I’ll call her “L.”–who lives a country away from me. I’ve talked to her online for about five years, on and off (mostly off); she was a very early beta tester for the first version of my computer sex game.

Well, she’s started talking to me again, after an online absence of some three years, during which much has evidently happened.

And, as these things do, the talk rolled around to sex. It came to pass that she issued me a challenge: Call me. By voice.

Well, I consider myself to be fairly ceative in bed. I have done many things and experienced many pleasures. But the whole of teh human sexual experience is vast; so vast, I believe, that even if one were to sample something new every single night for an entire lifetime, one could do little more than scratch the surface.

So it’s not necessarily that surprising, then, that I’ve never before experimented with phone sex. The fact that I had a deep and abading suspicion of anything not involving personal contact played a role as well; how can a disembodied voice, after all, ever hope to compete with the intensity and raw power of a “real” lover, in person?

How seriously I underestimated the power of a voice when coupled with a creative and fertile mind.

So now, it would seem, I am (in her own words) L.’s “Internet boy toy.” How very, very strange.

My wife finds the whole thing VASTLY amusing.

While idly flipping through the channels yesterday, I inadvertently stumbled across a Birttney Spears video. Howling in pain, I was fortunately able to gnaw off my own ears to escape, but the psychic trauma will, I fear, be lasting.

I wonder, though…

Do you suppose Ms. Spears, somewhere underneath all the training and conditioning instilled by the legions of writers and choreographers and image consultants and media relations people and producers and handlers and public relations consultants and hairdressers and other sundry puppeteers who surround her, realizes that she has sacrificed her own identity to get the fleeting instant of fame she’s enjoying right now?

And do you suppose she cares? One wonders if, left to her own devices, she would even have an identity worth developing…

…I’m becoming a handyman…

Just finished hanging a bunch of floodlights in my photographic studio. I feel like I’ve been doing nothing but home improvements and construction projects all week.

Hung track lights at the girlfriend’s house when we went up for Thanksgiving, then she and I sat down and designed a suspension frame. She’s really into the idea of suspension bondage–being tied and helpless, suspended horizontally off the ground…heh, heh, heh.

Ahem. Anyway, three trips to Home Depot, one truckload of lumber, four design revisions, and two days later, we had built a large, easily disassembled, rock-solid suspension frame. It’s about seven feet long, five feet wide, and six and a half feet tall, and it’s perfect for those times when “bound and helpless” is the only style that will do.

I’m very pleased with it, considering it’s only the second construction project I’ve ever attempted from wood. Eventually, I’ll get around to putting the plans on my do-it-yourself sex toys page.

But still, I’m supposed to be a computer geek, not a handyman! This manual labor thing…I dunno…

I thought hot Krispy Kreme donuts were a slice of Heaven. I have since discovered the error of my ways. Krispy Kreme donuts are wonderful things, at least while they’re hot, but they are the creations of mere man, not the angelic choir.

A small corner of Heaven is actually located off Peachtree Street in Atlanta, and it’s called “Dante’s.” It’s a fondue restaurant, see, that’s set up inside like an old Spanish galleon; when you walk in, it looks like you’re standing on an old-fashioned wharf, with water in the center and a scale model of a pirate ship floating in it. Dante, the rather eccentric owner, breeds crocodiles, which he keeps in the water around the ship.

If you want to know what Heaven is like, go to Dante’s for chocolate fondue. You need to book reservations for chocolate fondue at least 2 days in advance (that’s how long it takes them to prepare it), and they only serve it to one party a night. The chocolate is hand-folded for eight hours before you arrive, so get there EXACTLY when your reservations say.

When we arrived, we were brought into the special “chocolate room” and greeted by Dante himself, who is a very strange and quite entertaining man.

Then the chocolate arrived. Swiss chocolate, sweet cream, simmered together for eight hours.

Then the fruit tray arrived. Carried by two people. Bearing such a mountain of fruit that our server said in the 30-year history of Dante’s, only five parties have ever finished it all.

It was good.

Not Krispy Kreme good. Not “sirloin steak given to a starving man” good. Not “Congratulations, you’ve just won the Lotto!” good.

Oh, no. This was Roman Emperor good.

This was the most decadent thing I’ve ever experienced in my life–at least where everyone was dressed. This was “Heaven and a choir of angels meets nude Jello wrestling.” This was the bliss of Paradise and the decadence of the Roman senate in the same place.

We’re back from Atlanta now; I’ll write more or later.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Woke up this morning from a very strange dream. LordFuckBeast and I were back in college (how scary is that?), and I was watching him work on a very large painting out on the lawn when another friend of ours walked by carrying a large box of dice. He dropped the box, scattering dice everywhere; we helped him pick them up, but he was in a hurry and couldn’t find all of them. So, later, I found a set of blue dice, which I kept.

I like dice.

That got me to thinking about random numbers this morning. Throughout history, man has always been interested in generating random numbers; crude dice, usually made of bone, are among some of the most ancient artifacts that have ever been found.

Random numbers have value. They can be used to test computer algorithms, validate encryption techniques, and all sorts of interesting things. Trouble is, computers suck at generating random numbers. You can generate numbers that seem pretty random by using physical processes that are deterministic, but too complex to model–throwing dice, for example, or bouncing Ping Pongs around in a chamber.

Sun Microsystems has a patent on a computerized number generator that uses–get this–a bunch of potical sensors wired around a Lava Lamp. The sensors spit out random numbers based ont he motion of the blobs in the Lava Lamp. How cool is that?

—————

Last night, I had Krispy Kreme donuts for the first time in my life.

I don’t care about donuts, except insofar as the filled kind make excellent sex toys. I particularly have never cared for glazed donuts, which have always seemed to me like little fried slices of Hell, glazed with the lamentations of the sinners and with a convenient hole in the middle so you can eat them when you’re driving. Yuck!

But the girlfriend insisted, so we went to Krispy Kreme.

Their deal is that they give you donuts hot, right off the assembly line.

Oh, my God. When I ate one of these donuts, my eyes were opened. A chorus of angels sang overhead, and a little bit of Heaven revealed itself to me. Krispy Kreme donuts, freshly-made and so hot you can barely touch them, are the closest Man has yet come to Paradise, with the possible exception of French silk pie–also an excellent sex toy.

Just thought you might like to know.

Well, we made it up to Atlanta in one piece. Seven hour trip in five and a half hours…we drive way too fast. Funny bumper sticker on the way: “The South will rise again! And the North will put it right back in its place. Again.”

This afternoon, my girlfriend bought an hour massage as a gift for my wife. She loved it. While she was getting her massage, my girlfriend and I spent the afternoon hanging track lighting in her house.

Turns out the building contractor installed the wrong electrical junction boxes in the house, and as a result, we have a lot more work to do than we really should. After dinner, we need to head to Home Depot to get the correct junction boxes and some other miscellaneous things to finish the job. It should’ve been easy, but no.

You think used-car salesmen are bad? Try building contractors. Fsck.

On my girlfriend’s bookshelf: “The Lives of the Norse Kings,” “The Differential Equations Problem Solver,” “Applied Cryptography,” “BSD System Administrator’s Handbook,” “The Warp-Weighted Loom,” “The Art of Blacksmithing,” “The Once and Future Goddess,” “SM101,” “Decline and Fall of the American Programmer,” and “Chemical Engineering Thermodynamics.” Isn’t it amazing what you can tell about someone from their reading list?

Okay, so we went to see the Harry Potter movie Friday. Overall, it was not bad; I was surprised by the level of sophistication and the creativity in the storyline, given that it was based on a children’s book.

And yet…

This is a minor point, and not really a plot spoiler, but if you haven’t seen it, you might want to skip the next paragraph or two.

Students at the magical school in the Harry Potter books are divided into something like fraternities. Every year, they have a competition. Whenever someone does something right, his fraternity gets awarded points; whenever someone does something wrong, his fraternity loses points. At the end of the year, the fraternity with the most points gets a prize. Good system, in a military boot camp kind of way; screw up, and your entire unit will turn on you.

So. The story goes along, adventures happen, the school year progresses, Harry & friends save the world. But: The last scene, the big award night, and Harry’s fraternity has lost. They didn’t have enough points to win–due in no small part to Harry’s adventures while saving the world. Hard to concentrate on winning points when you’re trying to save the world, you know?

So the leader of the school announces, mid-ceremony, that he’s changinf the rules for the year, and awarding the prize to Harry’s fraternity anyway.

What the hell kind of blind, stupid thing is that??! Not only is it highly unlikely–by doing so, he publically humiliated the leader of the winning fraternity (a key ally)–but it also teaches exactly the wrong lesson. The RIGHT lesson is: You can’t always win at everything. Sometimes, doing right (saving the world) means sacrificing things of lower priority (winning an award). The WRONG lesson is: Kids, the whole system is a sham. It doesn’t matter what you do. It doesn’t matter if you win honestly, fair and square. Some adult can come along and yank the prize right out from under you, simply because he feels like it. Don’t worry about winning points; the points don’t mean shit. It’s all about whether or not authority figures like you.

So anyway…

The “other” girlfriend came over Saturday. Sunday, my wife went out to lunch with friends, so the girlfriend and I got to spend some alone time together, which was very, very nice. I took advantage of the opportunity to do some delightfully wicked and evil things to her (Her: “How deep did you have your hand?” Me: “All the way…”), and we both ended up tired and happy.

My wife’s friends dropped a bombshell on her at lunch…”We’ve been experimenting with this new thing, see, it’s called S&M.” My wife: “Oh, really? Come on over. I’ll have Franklin give you a seminar.”

Imagine my surprise.

So afterward, we all went out to the club. My wife’s friends were fascinated. I received a delightful flogging from the girlfriend, and still have the lash marks to prove it. *sigh*

Today, on my way to the office, my car dies abruptly. No warning, just up and quits.

Imagine my surprise. Clearly, fate is exacting its payment for the totally delightful weekend.

I should be home right now. I should be packing for our Thanksgiving trip to my primary girlfriend’s place. Am I? No. I’m still at the office. Fickle thing, fate.

Was it worth it? Oh, yes.