Another great weekend, another looong week. This seems like the pattern these days.

Good Weekend:

Both of the girlfriends, Shelly and M, visited kellyv and I for the weekend. M and Shelly get along with one another absolutely wonderfully,which is a happy thing indeed. Shelly also marks just as nicely under a flogger as she does under a crop. 🙂

Sunday, we also had the distinct pleasure of meeting sunyata__ for the first time. sunyata__ is a very cool person. She’s witty, she’s smart, she’s outgoing, and she’s a lot of fun to talk to.

She’s cute, too. 🙂

We all five got Thai food and headed out to PolyTampa, where I bought a Basic Stamp and programming kit from a friend of mine, with the express purpose of using it to develop prototype programmable “smart” sex toys.

It’s time for sex toys to move into the Information Age, dammit.

Long Week:

Going to a convention in Miami at the end of the week; I’ll be demonstrating prepress software for one of my clients. Will it be fun? No. With a bit of luck, Shelly will be able to join me for some of the time I’ll be there, but I’m still not especially looking forward to the trip.

The Future:

I’m becoming somewhat disenchanted with the career path I’m on, particularly in light of the fact that I could be making a great deal of money elsewhere, such as by doing application support for Adobe. My company’s growth has been stalled for the past six months or so by the sour economy (thank you, George Dubya), and the business I really want to focus on, high-tech sex toys, has been stymied by lack of capital.

Astonishing as it seems, I could almost see myself working for Adobe. It would certainly provide a boost in my income while freeing up resources to dedicate to the things I want to be doing. Advertising and prepress work is becoming a drag, especially in light of the economic conditions, and I don’t believe I’m going to make as much doing it as I want.

kellyv and I have started considering attending the upcoming Florida Poly Retreat, which originally we weren’t planning to attend. But we’ll be able to share cabin space with smoocherie, fritzcat66, and Shelly. smoocherie has also invited me to sit on a panel, which could be interesting. So kellyv and I are thinking it’s a go.

It will be interesting to spend time with smoocherie and fritzcat66. I don’t really know smoocherie as well as I would like, though I do know fritzcat66 a bit better and find him philosophically quite enlightened.

Hmm. So: Adobe or my own prepress company? Is there a market for smart sex toys?

Shelly marks so nicely under a crop.
Picture (warning: NOT work-safe!)

San Francisco, from altenra‘s vantage point.

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Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad catapult tuum saxum
immane mittam.

(I have a catapult. Give me all the money, or I will fling an enormous rock
at your head.)

What would YOU do for a Klondike bar?

It’s late, I’m tired, I’m going to bed.

Visions of a consumer whore. In flash, with sound. Very funny, and fucking brilliant.

In the kitchen. With rubber gloves.

I am not a morning person.

I knew that my flight would be leaving very early in the morning. So naturally, I took the appropriate measures the night before. kellyv and I went to a late dinner with several friends from PolyTampa, and when we got back home at about midnight, I spent the next hour playing Age of Mythology.

Which, just for the record, I beat.

So I finally got to bed nice and early, at about 1:30 AM, so as to look and feel my best for my cross-country flight a few hours later.

All things considered, kellyv is an amazing person. Not only did she deal with my agonizing pain, incessant whining, and general bad disposition with grace and charm when we awoke, she even drove me to the airport.

Or should I say, dropped me off in South-Central Hell (lower level).

My flight into San Francisco offered something not listed in any of the travel guides: Two unrelated girls, age 13 and 14, travelling unaccompanied across the country.

I had a center seat. Keirston, age 13, had the aisle seat; Kelly, 14, had the window seat.

I was a late bloomer. When I was 13, I didn’t particularly care about girls at all. As it turns out, there was a very good reason for that. 13-year-old girls suck.

“Like, my stepmom is such a bitch! She never lets me do anything. When I, like, wanted a cell phone, she, like, totally said no. So I had to get a cell phone and have the bill sent to my boyfriend. He’s like, totally stupid, and I had to break up with him last month. He’s still so, like, totally seventh grade.”

there. is. no. god.

Aha! I thought. Keirston, Kelly, I am older and wiser than you. I have my laptop and my MP3s. I can escape you! I can retreat into my own world!

Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.

“Like, you have a laptop! How much did it cost? I want a laptop, but, like, my stepmom totally won’t let me have one. She has a laptop. She bought it with my dad’s money.”

Three hours of of this hell feels like thirty years.

The universe is not utterly dedicated to evil, though. The weather in San Francisco was beautiful, and remained so for most of the rest of the week, as if to atone for forcing me to endure the inane chatter of teenage girls. And I was rescued from my own little private Hell and transported back to sanity by feorlen and her boyfriend Steve, who restored me to mental health by bestowing the most sacred of blessings, old tech.

Being in San Francisco is in many ways like visiting ground zero of a city vaporized by a nuclear explosion.

The buildings are still standing, and the city is still inhabited, but the wreckage of the explosion is everywhere. It’s not a physical explosion; it’s more like a psychological bomb has detonated, destroying the economy of the city in a single flash.

Unemployed tech workers are everywhere. The ruins of the dot-com economy litter the landscape.

When the bomb fell on Japan at the close of World War II, something peculiar happened: The structures directly beneath the explosion remained standing, while everything all around was utterly levelled.

The equivalent in San Francisco is Weird Stuff.

Imagine a cavernous warehouse, stretching almost to infinity, packed to the roof with ancient, cast-off computer technology and the liquidated remnants of a dozen failed dot-com companies.

Row after row of old computers. Miles of cable, no doubt pulled from the walls of office buildings and sold in bulk for pennies on the dollar. Boxes of liquid-crystal displays and rackmount modems and data-acquisition cards from VMEbus computers. Programmable logic analyzers. Macintosh SEs. Parts from discarded mainframes. VAXstations!

They had VAXstations!

Solaris 1.0 CDs. Empty 19-inch racks. Silicon Graphics computers. Gutted RAID arrays as tall as a man’s head.

I have a SPARCststion-20 server system at home. I have not used it, because it requires a proprietary keyboard and mouse only available from Sun.

$19.95 at Weird Stuff.

From Hell, one escapes into Heaven.

I could have spent a week and a thousand dollars there, were it not for the fact that I would try kellyv‘s infinite patience.

The taste for old tech is a specific thing, built into one’s very genes. If one does not have this taste, then it seems weird and slightly deranged.

kellyv finds my collection of obsolete computers weird and slightly deranged. She puts up with it with humor and good grace, but there’s no denying the fact that my prized collection of TRS-80s and ancient Apple machines is something she suffers benevolently, rather than something that fills her heart with nostalgic glee as it does mine.

My tour, Dante-esque, through a cross-section of Hell and of Heaven complete, it was time to hook up with Shelly to check into the hotel, do some serious fucking, and sample what the city has to offer.

The first two, she and I could accomplish on our own. To do the third, we would need a guide.

San Francisco is home to an S&M sex club called The Power Exchange, a place which is kind of like Disney World for the BDSM set. It features everything a pervert might ever dream of: prison cells, a medieval dungeon, racks, crosses, examining tables, cages, pr0n rooms, even a place called the Cow Room whose decor is all black and white spots.

I had had the foresight to bring a collar and leash to SF with me, on the idea we might end up at a goth club. Leading Shelly through the Power Exchange on a leash was a real treat for both of us. Shelly is a person unafraid of self-discovery, and when she begins exploring something new, she does so without hesitation or reservation.

Pool tables, too, though we did not have the opportunity to shoot a game of pool. Perhaps next time.

The pr0n on display wasn’t all that good, really. In fact, “wasn’t all that good” is probably a bit kind. Fortunately, altenra brings her laptop, and her collection of high-quality pr0n, everywhere she goes. Bathtub Lesbians… If you haven’t seen it, your life is a darker place.

kellyv, my “other” girlfriend M, and I have spent some quality time together in a very small S&M club that existed once in Tampa and has, alas, since closed. kellyv has a bit of the voyeur in her, particularly where my girlfriends and I are involved, and I was quite disappointed she was not able to accompany us to the Power Exchange. She would truly have enjoyed what came next.

When we’d had our fill of Bathtub Lesbians and the other offerings in altenra‘s library, it was time for the show. I led Shelly to a large, leather-bound bed between the judge-fetish pr0n and the redneck-fetish pr0n, and began, very gently, to caress her wonderful bare ass with the crop that had been her Christmas gift from me.

“You need good Russian whipping. In Soviet Union, we know how to deal with decadent Western whores like you.”

CRACK

Shelly marks so beautifully. A welt appears instantly as the crop lands, which turns within a day into a lovely, perfectly straight bruise, that serves nicely as a reminder.

CRACK

She had never had a whipping before she and I made our connection. It is so magnificient to see her respond, to watch her scream and writhe and moan in pleasure under the crop, to see her discover a part of herself whose shape she had never known before. She is a pain slut, and her enthusiasm and raw, uncontrollable pleasure under the ministrations of the crop is a joy to behold.

CRACK

For others, as well as for myself. Within moments of her first delicious scream, we had attracted an audience. Her awareness of the attention, and the knowledge that she was on stage, fed into her pleasure, making her crave even more.

CRACK

I wish that kellyv could have shared in the experience. She is a voyeur, but watching such a thing when it is your lover’s lover who is the center of attention is especially delicious.

Soon Shelly’s screams had turned to laughter, that giddy rush of endorphins and adrenaline that transforms the pain into the most beautiful, erotic pleasure you might ever imagine. The crowd was quite think by now, people jostling one another for the best position to see the transformation.

Finally, Shelly’s ass and thighs were a mosaic of hard, straight welts, and she was in the place where every touch is ecstasy. I caressed her and stroked her, and helped her to her feet, transfigured as a person by an experience nothing like she had ever had before. She was radiant, floating in an endorphin high. There was nothing left but a return to our hotel for an exhausted sleep, punctured by dreams of the experience like aftershocks from an earthquake that forever alters the landscape at its center.

altenra calls herself my “two-day-a-year friend.” I met her last year, when I was in San Francisco for MacWorld, my own personal hajj, my yearly pilgrimage to Mecca.

altenra knows San Francisco the way Niccolo Machiavelli knows the secret heart of man. When I met her last year, standing beneath an enormous neon sign reading “Virgin,” she offered to take me on a walking tour of San Francisco which, some eighteen miles later, left me limping around the West Coast’s most famous landmarks, and later made every step at MacWorld a constant source of agony.

Shelly and I had by this time already established our reputations among the staff of the Mosser Hotel as “the perverts of room 407.” This was partly accidental, owing to the unfortunate discovery of Shelly’s collection of sex toys by an unsuspecting maid, and partly the result of the conjunction of thin walls, strong sexual appetite, and Shelly’s amazing vocal talent.

It should be noted as an aside that when Shelly and I first became lovers, she warned me that she has a very low libido. This may have been true at one time, but as we were to discover, it was more a matter of her circumstance than it was of her fundamental nature. Her fundamental nature, once revealed, is the stuff of which legends are made.

Nevertheless, it eventually transpired that we wanted to play the role of the tourist. Shelly also saw a need to procure some of the miscellaneous items that one inevidably neglects to pack and discovers that one needs in any cross-country trip, such as over-the-counter painkillers, a better pair of walking shoes, and a strap-on dildo. So it was a blessing to have available the services of a talented and knowledgeable tour guide such as altenra.

Visiting San Francisco in the company of altenra is a treat. She knows the best places to eat, the most magnificant views of the city, the hidden attractions that might be missed by a casual tourist. She knows the city’s public transportation system better than the people who designed it. She knows the best sex toy shops.

But she was faced with a dilemma.

On my trip last year, she had already shown me the obvious places to see, and San Francisco is, after all, a finite place. What to do on a second visit?

What more was there to do? At that point, nothing but the hidden place that had the most magnificient view of the city ever imaginable to God or man, and a visit to an S&M sex club where Shelly and I can share an experience that will help her discover aspects of herself as a person that she had before only barely been able to conceptualize.