Talking with Strangers

I played outside with friends and siblings throughout childhood and early adulthood and still prefer a lake or forest to my computer (though you wouldn’t know it, as I’m glued to this contraption most of the time). The number one rule we got taught was not to talk to strangers. Back then talking to strangers happened face to face, and that stranger could snatch you away, drug you, lure you into a van with candy, or somehow deceive you like the Devil into unholy marriage…

Concerning talking with strangers: Things. Have. Changed.

I have a profile on half a dozen dating or socializing websites these days. They’re all slightly different, and I use each of them for different purposes. Considering my proclivities outlined in this here blog, understand that I don’t always lead whips and needle points out… I consider who my audience is when I write a profile. I consider the type of people who are also attracted to that website, and what my agenda is for each particular space. I think about who on each site I might be compatible with, versus whose agenda or advances I want kept far far away… Is the site “friend” friendly, or am I in violation of expectations if I’m not looking for FWB, NSA, LTRs, anonymous sex, etc.? Is the site kink friendly? How many intolerantly religious or conservative people will hit on me, ignoring the fact that I mentioned my queer, kinky, fluid, non-binary trans, non-monogamous, liberal and socialist as fuck, neo drag and burlesque performing, sex-positive, anti-misogynistic, anti-racist, egalitarian stuff right up front? Is the demographic tweaked older or younger? Is the demographic tweaked along gendered assumptions concerning power dynamics or traditional roles? Do I think any of the people I meet on the site will become close friends, potential dates, research buddies, clients, the list goes on…

I am a character actor. My job in this lifetime has been to watch people and listen to people and figure out what makes them tick. I also am a person (read: creature). An autonomous individual carrying around my own feelings and fears and blind spots and questions and beliefs. But mostly I’m a person who wants to meet you like I climb a tree. I want to see you from across a field and be interested in your form and movements. I want that momentarily piqued interest to slowly become the desire to get closer and investigate. I want approaching you to be anything but disappointing — please don’t be rotten or surrounded by poison ivy… I want to put my hands on you, gingerly at first, and then full palm contact, sliding my arm around a branch, little by little giving you some of my weight. If it feels good and I can figure out how to do it, I want to crawl up your trunk, unpuzzling ways to get higher as we play this game of understanding our bodies together for the first time. When I’ve gotten to a place that feels good I want stillness and fresh air — to lie across your boughs perfectly balanced, only a little afraid that I’ll drop. The climb down will be thoughtful and new too. I won’t always be able to see where I’m going, but our solidly built connection heading up will help. And then a hug and a sigh — until next time I’m around, Tree, it was beautiful being with you.

It’s unfortunate that most people I meet online do not climb trees with any regularity.

There is instead, with these safe-to-talk-to-’cause-online strangers, a blundering certainty that I am existent only to be placed like a bow upon a bough. It is assumed I will stay put until faded, worn, and falling apart, until I am taken down. It seems believed, in these many circles, that tree creatures are to be cut apart or molded into a shape that fits the suburban street they are growing on — even though Tree was a seedling before most houses in this neighborhood came around. I don’t want your candy, your silver tongue’d promises, your vitriol for saying no, Troll. I want respect and solidity. Solidarity.

Every now and then with some sweet strangers I get to be Tree, feeling their creature climbing feelings, and bearing the weight of attention. I get to hold them in a naturally balanced and open place for just a moment before they get down. These are good message days…

How to talk to a stranger whose sense of touch is the plastic smoothness of a keyboard, not the rough and tumble ever changing texture of our barks? You cannot cut and paste the experience of a hiking trip or nighttime skinnydip. When we meet we have not seen it all, we have seen nothing! I like to be a creature meeting Tree, find me in a field or forest playing.

Play On My Friends,
~ Karin

If you like my blog, please check out my Patreon Page and support me. For one time donations click here: Support the Artist

~Thank you.

Creatures Talk

Photo by RADskillZ Photography 2013

As I navigate perpetually, the adult and kinky world, I find it ever more interesting to come in and out of conversations with people who are looking for that “something” they cannot put words to. I understand this intimately, of course, as I’ve had my own years of no words for urges — and sometimes resistance to the words I do know.

I remember being young when sex was brand new and I had feelings and desires to please, but no understanding of how my own body worked really (I’m still learning). The emotional rollercoaster of trying new things and feeling afraid that I’d done something wrong the day after… Those were the rough and tumble Gen-X days where “no meant no”, before “yes meant yes” was even a thing, and honestly as long as no one was saying no, you just kept watching for signals, picking up on the language of the body in front of you, and asking questions… Well, I asked a lot of questions. I was repeatedly brushed off by some partner’s resistance, mumbling that I was weird for asking: “how does that feel?”, “can I bite harder?”, “Tell me about your fantasies?”, “What was sex with your last partner like?”… It just seemed natural to ask — I wanted to know and I wanted to please, I wanted to understand what actions felt like to other people. Vulnerably talking about sex has always been a turn-on. Talking about sex makes sex feel safer and more accessible to me.

The partners who were experimental were always my favorites. We would work out algorithms in bed, or construct science experiments to find out what might happen if… We would unfold our fantasies for hours with one another and surprise each other with an instruction video about “how to” that thing, or a new toy tossed on the bed, or… or… or. Mmmm.

The partners I’ve had who didn’t like to talk about sex triggered my own stuff, locked up in fear and shame. I had a hard time feeling turned on with those people, though I loved them, because I didn’t know what to expect and I didn’t know if I was ok to try. I constantly thought I was going to get in trouble for doing something wrong… No one was asking me what I wanted in those relationships either, so if what was happening didn’t work, frustrations would often abound when I tried to speak up and connect about it or shift the scene elsewhere. Explosions sometimes. Too often. For years I just tiptoed further and further into my own underground, suspending my pleasure in an effort to un-disruptively please. There were some who were half and half — eager to learn from me and play but withholding of their own inner worlds — desires I could never understand because the answer to what they wanted always just fell flat. So we would come up up empty handed in our ups and downs leading to fun-and-unfulfilled in the end.

Can I teach you how to talk and listen? Can I help you practice saying the words? If I could be your lover/sub/Dominant I think those might be my favorite games…

I want you to challenge me and my libido by getting into it with me when we’re together. Good, bad, ugly, divine — can we remain open in our primal elements near one another’s critiques and fantasies? Curiosity seems the most natural way to be. I want negotiation be the song which gets our hips shifting in time and both of us smiling.

I want to unlock your/our/my potential when we connect. I want sex and kink and all the things we intimately desire to be like a vacation or a road trip together. Your body is a map I am discovering with a missing key that together we construct, figuring out each easy-to-complex symbolic meaning. Let’s hunt paths to their natural conclusions or trace back origins, learn new ways of interpreting each idea and riff off into uncharted land… Through trust let’s conjure instinct, and just ’cause instinct let’s not abandon conversation.

I often cannot give an enthusiastic yes to your blunt sex question, but I can usually give a thoughtful and honest “let’s try”! I’ll let you know if it isn’t working, and you’ll probably know if it is. In our current world ruled by articulation via keyboard we’re losing attention to detail — scent shifting, facial spasms, breath patterns, energy flow, eye connection… If you hate what just happened, kindly tell me please. I have no desire for you to endure my experiment which was designed to try and turn you on in the first place. Let’s talk and listen in all the ways about what we’re doing. Let’s figure things out rather than fight about intentions in the face of failed experiments or miscommunication. Let’s utilize our primal instincts and check in. The instinct of good loving is animal, and creatures talk, after all.

Play On My Friends,
~ Karin

If you like my blog, please check out my Patreon Page and support me. For one time donations click here: Support the Artist

~Thank you.

Strangers

Karin Performing with Clothspins

Photo by Rachel Leah Blumenthal

I do not know where I am from. Scottish moors, French and Canadian soil, Mohawk territory, mutt lands from vague corners of the world nestled closely together, and sometimes not… Maine. That magical mystical place where whispering bugs and the voices of trees unfold every secret I needed to know growing up. Part California by genetics: one bone is arguing about the primordial taste of stone fruits, and keeps reusable cloth menstrual pads about. I am a Pagan Savant, invoked in childhood as I lay full body draped on top of Earth and long warm grasses in summer. I knew hugeness in my chest, felt private and quiet and giggled softly at the secrets between my fluttering feelings and the soil, heat kissing my back and neck, my first unicorn experience. I am from my Mother, and her Mother before, and Hers, mixed in are men and Others covered up by the lies of papered identity I’ll never really know better than. These Others I come direct line down from too. Mixed in are the stories of Father, which sculpt the sand of my shape into walls, boundaries of flesh for my blood to flow through and around. Rumors abound that connection to this archetypal animation are real, but I don’t believe in Fathers. (Somewhere a game of chess just ended in stalemate. Clapping won’t resuscitate…) It’s like Tug ‘o War ropes knotted at center but far from fairly played, or plastic cups tethered with string, vibrating nonsense for the distance and corners in between. The space between myself and any other body holds a certain tension until it breaks. With no other end reining me in, I begin the bittersweet sad/angry shuffle of moving on.

I don’t know where I am from — all these photographs in boxes, tongues spoken, lullabies remembered, movements copied, and stories conjured in the dark — but I know where I am going. Like the rising of the Sun on a perfect morning, I was created to connect with you; to embrace what you hand over; to hold hope in the form of listening. Each time the magnetic pull of our bodies cement with dilated pupil, curled lips, and quick thoughts tumbling around and over each other, I am the Sun in this room warming your Earth. Our offspring are ideas grown from the heat and intensity of electric arcing ways. One outstretched hand meets prick-painful half startling jolt with another. We both jump, yet it is the overjoying wash of adrenaline from pain that piques interest to begin with. It cannot be denied — though excited lubrication, intrigue, passion, and monstrous desire thrive, there too lies sadomasochistic thrill — the realistic expectation not forever to hang about. We will create voraciously for a time and then divide. Each divorce a different story; riding similar emotional lines. I’ve grown studied on the path of infliction and healing, licking wounds through armor impenetrable, finding power within failure time and time again.

You see, only in opposition do I find myself at all; where I am.

Staring at the fairy tale mirror of forever, two-dimensional and far less physical than my three-dimensional navigations could ever have been. Standing on my side of things, I am still alive. In me, Sun-grown weeds overtake sculpted trajectory. My feral wilds, thorns protecting sweeter berries, articulated assassination of the norm darkening me within, all this in service to my perfectly natural instincts cultivated from anywhere-nowhere-everywhere: I am flesh and blood, sticky and not like. What impotent words have you for the wholeness that I am — estranged, stranger, strange.

Play On My Friends,
~ Karin

If you like my blog, please check out my Patreon Page and support me. For one time donations click here: Support the Artist

~Thank you.

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