This page is a journal dedicated to understanding a relationship to pain and desire as it occurs to the subject after being long abstracted in a layered dissociative structure and after incurring chronic injury.
Whippings have continued every few days. Got to go to the store later this week and I might pick up a wooden spatula or something else I can use as a dedicated implement if I find things sturdy enough to suit my designs. Looking forward to little else.
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7/31/2026 6;03PM Reclining on couch. PT was good, working with someone who is really thorough and knowledgeable. Making real progress after my setback a few weekends ago, right knee hurts though. Physical therapy is not unlike my abstract sex rituals where I get tortured by a beautiful woman wearing sexy nitrile gloves. It's funny the short throughline between my sudden disability and sudden de-compartmentalizing. Got an orthotic insole on Wednesday that I'm adjusting to. It all necessitates certain tools, methods, ritualistic structure, specific power exchanges. A local pop station plays over the radio all day at the facility. As I was gritting my teeth getting my foot crushed therapeutically, Boyz II Men played directly overhead: "Girl, your wish is my command/ I submit to your demands/ I will do anything/ Girl, you need only ask."... I almost rolled my eyes.Steeling myself for a beating today. I have gone a little over a week due to extenuating circumstances, family visiting the apartment. T doesn't want anyone to hear my screams. We could have just said we were watching a really scary movie. I've decided on a sensory deprivation hood to get custom made for my first "real" piece of gear. I think it's a good time to go for it after so many years doing s&m. It's made of leather and has a cute zipper mouth. 11;41PM update: recieved a thorough whipping as expected with the rubber horsewhip. T started stroking me gently between strikes and counted down from ten on the last bout. It really made me zero in and immediately fall into that endorphin trance. I wished she could have fit more numbers between ten and one.
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7/26/2026 12;25AM Pasted a smart little scroll box into my code for this page. A little formatting goes a long way, I was tired of my background image slowly stretching huger as I added more writing. Sitting at my desk working on projects too much lately so I'll lay down shortly.
7/26/2026 3;33PM I have not talked to my therapist about my relationship with pain since the entry where I last described doing so. I have been deliberating on it but I stop myself when I have the chance to bring it up. I want to talk to someone else about these things I've been writing about but I don't think she would understand so I have not even told her about my engagement in s&m and how important it's always been to me. I know the ways I'm insane so I take a lot of care not to push it too far and to understand how it affects me, I don't want to be told that it's unhealthy when it's done much more for me than self-injury ever could. Not that being told that would stop me. Today I am reading Bob Flanagan's Pain Journal, written in the last years before his death while the pain of dying eclipsed his life, and he described designing and putting himself in a contraption that forced him to eat his own shit in order to be freed from it. I thought wow, that's so badass, I could never do that. I'm not cool enough to eat my own poop. At the end of the entry he signs off, "Felt stupid at the sight of my shit covered face in the mirror. But I'll try it again. Keep doing it until I get it right." I was moved by the dignified resolve in these last lines in spite of the intense debasement of it all.
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7/25/2026 9;58PM Soaking the dogs in a hot bucket at my desk, just finished a mug of earl grey, feeling angry, stupid and lonely. Calves are good and feet were feeling good by the end of the weekdays but they're very tense and knotted up now that it's Saturday, maybe it is the house slippers' doing since I take my supportive walking shoes off in the apartment. The sodas probably worsen inflammation too. Keeping up with stretching, massaging, hot bucket to cold ice pack, started magnesium supplements, I am trying to massage the knots out of my feet but touching them and feeling the big painful lumps in there makes me feel disgusted so it's slow going. It was hard to bring myself to do it but I'm making progress on withstanding it. Tired of sitting around trying to get better. Working through pain to reach my desire. Acting on my desires to feel pain. It would be a lot more fun to be stuck sitting around if I was stuck in some kind of restraint. Planning on adding some gallery-style pages to this site to put my many photographs and artworks on. I'd have to learn more code first. I want to incorporate s&m into my body of work in a way that's a little more conceptual or abstract than just drawing pictures of softcore pornography.
Fantasizing idly about visiting a public dungeon so we can use some fun sex furniture in a strange creepy room. Who even goes to sex dungeons? What kind of people would we meet there? A bunch of freaks for sure. Been making stupid, ugly music and dwelling on what kind of restraint would best suit my machinations. A sleep sack or straitjacket would be a lot of fun, but being stuck in something I won't easily be able to get out of on my own is something I have little if any experience in and makes me shy away. It's a big commitment to get something fancy and serious like that. The things I'm able to do are already restricted by injury so not being able to use my hands is also not ideal right now. I think I can find some four-point medical bed restraints on ebay. They got adjustable strap lengths and quick-release closures so M could keep me on a long leash while I keep myself busy, or spread-eagle while she tortures me. Gave myself a flogigng on the 21st, 20 hard lashes that were very satisfying in my elevated mood. I wanted more but stopped so I wouldn't hurt my unstable shoulder again. I got the horsewhip the day before yesterday after taking a vacation from it for a little while to let my marks heal from my times getting horsewhipped last week. It was really intensely painful and I had to tap out for the second time ever in my life. It was satisfying. I'll have to acclimate to it all over again. I feel too brain damaged to say anything insightful and it's been tough to get much reading done. It's all been said before and better, I read something and understand it, and then when I step away from the text or whatever medium I can't recall the points outlined or the connections I made. All the senses used to feel like a grindstone against my nerves but I've dulled down and I want the painful clarity to return. I wish I could find enjoyment in the involuntary pain but I think that might just kill me. Desire remains forever linked to the pain of lack and disappointment.
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7/21/2026 8;36PM At my desk again, drinking a Pepsi. Just soaked my feet in hot epsom salt water, icing the bad one on an ice pack. Feels good, then it hurts to walk. Calves are slightly less tense after regular massaging and adjusted seating. An opportunity arose for me to pursue a restorative coding project I've been trying to find the means to start for a few years now and I'm so excited I can't focus. I had mostly given up on finding what I needed and on a whim went looking around one last time today. It's going to be a lot of work and I may take a break from maintaining this journal.
Still haven't been beaten since my last paddling over the weekend. My excitement is inspiring me to revisit the sisal flogger alone tonight.
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7/20/2026 10;46PM Seated at my desk drinking seltzer. Slow improvement but the bad foot still hurts from the weekend before last when it bends to perform normal walking movement. Both calves extremely tense, I was introduced a new stretch to address this in PT today. Getting a bucket of my own to soak my stupid aching dogs in. Fatigue and nasty sore throat from the 200+ AQI this week.
My last beating was a few days ago, I was spanked with the wooden paddle 100 times on each cheek. I could have continued but it was very satisfying anyway. It felt very intimate, and the embarassment over how much I enjoyed the humiliating position intensified the experience. I was reading about how humiliation is experienced by the nervous system as identical to physical pain, activating the same neural pathways, since social connection is vital to survival and a social animal may easily die if rejected from its group. Humiliation makes people kill themselves sometimes, like other forms of torture. Freud asserted that the sadist is always at once a masochist, and "only able to feel pleasure in inflicting pain because he has experienced in the past a link between his own pleasure and the pain he has suffered."
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7/17/2026 12;40PM Slowly healing. Got a temporary A/C unit. Air quality has been terrible due to forest fires up north. Tired of appointments every day for so long. It's a lot of work and I'm not getting paid for it. Going to PT in an hour. Exercises have been limited to account for my weekend injury. I worry that I'm too careful and then it gets re-injured from overuse.
Faced another whipping last night. Each one is harsher than the last, and this one was much more satisfying than any prior. The frustration did not immediately return like I had described in prior entries. Reading about Oedipal and psychodynamic theories of masochistic sexuality to supplement Deleuze's Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty. It's all a little esoteric. Maybe cocaine would help me understand.
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7/13/2026 11;52PM Back home and feeling unstable. A/C is busted, drinking cold seltzer. Rescheduled PT to tomorrow due to circumstance. Injured my bad foot with my weekend help-task, it's swollen with sharp pain. Maybe I should have remained home, but I feel like that would not have been the right choice. Oh well. Hot shower, ice pack, prescription anti inflammatory. Enough for a debaucherous night of sitting around reading and shortly going to bed. It's a big relief to be back where I can use my wheelchair. Walking around without it available feels like I'm unspooling a line as I go that I will not walk past the length of.
I thought I would have nothing to report but after I wrote that first segment I took a break and then got whipped with the rubber horsewhip until I cried. It was intensely arousing but as soon as it's over the frustration returns. I'm always wanting more. Getting tired of my obsessive desire for a beating. At least it overrides the bad thoughts, and in a way that doesn't seem to cause an emotional buildup like with reflexive compartmentalizing. Just a different kind of frustration that stays at a steady level. The repressive compulsions have been dramatically reduced since my last major dissociative processing event. This change happened in tandem with the intensified libido. Shame is no longer an impassable wall that severs thought and memory. Or so it seems.
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7/12/2026 6;22PM Catching up on sleep debt, out of town helping family since no one else could. I did not have to go without my prescription, but I'm addressing right now other events that I didn't have the mind to predict. Foot's more swollen than it should be, doing hot soaks and ice pack compresses. I think the effects of my care for it are being overrided by the work that needs to be done. Frustrated by the emotional hangups that restrict my family's ability to form connections and care for one another when help is really needed. Increasingly often I'm stepping in to take responsibility and it'll only happen more often as my parents continue into advanced age.
No s&m since describing my last entry. I have however started reading Deleuze's Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty. When I can untangle his opaque writing style I find it describing things that I've considered without having the skill to articulate verbally and explore beyond shallowness. In it, Deleuze analyzes and challenges the complementary relationship between sadism and masochism that is implicity suggested by the term "sadomasochism" and its wide usage. In analyzing Sade's illustration of violence as indistinguishable from demonstrative reason, and his sadistic protagonists' unsolvable frustration at realizing that negation can only exist as a mirror of the positive, Deleuze connects this to the desire for this unattainable concept, the Freudian "delusion of reason", for pure negation or "the No", unordered chaos that subsumes all possible order. The sadist is limited by nature from attaining it and is fruitlessly driven by this delusion of reason to continually increase suffering inflicted on others. Profound apathy is born from the recognition of the impossibility of total chaos without order, the desire is never sated, as a person is defined by their bodily and social limitations, no comfort is found in one's own pleasure at the expense of another. I'm reminded of the part of myself that floats outside as a slab of architecture, only able to affect my mind through negation and limiting what it is I can think and feel by forcing it through cement channels. Limitations define what it is, this is all it knows, and it lives in a flattened state of distant amusement. It wouldn't be what it is without me to distinguish itself from. I wouldn't be who I am without the world and the way I've been made to be subordinated within it. Deleuze supposes a difference between the desires of the sadist and masochist, as they are textually illustrated by the respective authors: the masochist seeking entrance into a contractual agreement, guiding as an 'educator' figure, the sadist, the 'instructor' desiring institutional control, to violate the contract in an imposition of will and Spinozist act of demonstrative reasoning. Each engage in fetishistic transcendence of the physical and descriptive relations into a symbolic world either mythologically ideal or mechanistically theoretical. Imagination vs. reason. In contrast to the Spinozan demonstration in service to the Freudian No, in Masoch's work there is identified the desire to attain the Platonic Ideal wherein "the victim speaks through the mouth of the torturer" and a fear of castration is inverted into castration becoming the desired result. It's hard to parse and I'm not versed in philosophy of mind or otherwise. Like Masoch's Severin, my interests and studies are wide, but shallow in depth. I'll have to read Freud's writing on the subject to more easily understand what's being conveyed. I laughed at the description of the masochist's caricaturization of the law through contractually pursuing the most extreme power imbalance: "By scrupulously applying the law we are able to demonstrate its absurdity and provoke the very disorder that it is intended to prevent or to conjure... by zealously embracing it, we may hope to partake of its pleasures. The law is no longer subverted by the upward movement of irony to a principle that overrides it, but by the downward movement of humor which seeks to reduce the law to its furthest consequences." Hahaha. So true.
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7/9/2026 5;25AM Underslept for days, increments of 2 hours of sleep at a time. The neck and shoulder pain is worsened by having gone to the DMV, had to get up recently because of it. Foot is about the same but stiff after going about a week without physical therapy. I haven't been able to secure an appointment for the upper body pain yet. My PT coverage didn't actually go through yesterday so today I'm calling to see if it finally did. Other issues with delays in unrelated prescription order and then the order being out of stock at the pharmacy. Bracing for having to go without again. A lot of stress and frustration regarding all this which I know is affecting my sleep now, as it has in the recent past. I slept a few hours between two and four AM and only got two, maybe three hours the night before as well. Napped another two hours yesterday afternoon, had to get up for remote group therapy which went painfully. Communicating a lot more with people this week and always regretting it deeply. Trying to just push past that feeling.
My ass is covered in red welts, which feels very good. It feels like when a burn feels icy cold. The rubber whip needs to be used with care so that M doesn't maim me with it. I wouldn't mind that at all but I appreciate the limits she maintains out of concern for my safety. When we used it initially she was enthusiastic about having something she can easily inflict a lot of pain with without straining herself, but after the recent session she described some of the fun being taken out of it when compared to how a riding crop handles, where you can really wail with it for a while with little fear of injury. A long wooden cooking spoon might be an ideal middle ground but we shouldn't use her actual cooking implements for whacking. We'll see. I'm really enjoying the overwhelming pain of the whip and would love it if she pushed it, but it was mentally exhausting to experience during my period of impaired sleep. Despite this, it put me in a much better place than I was after dealing with all the aforementioned stressors recently. I feel a lot better after getting whipped to tears with a horrible device. Yay!!!
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7/8/2026 8;54AM Gotta go to the DMV this morning. Insurance should have approved more coverage by now so I won't have to miss any more physical therapy, but I have not slept nearly enough so I may reschedule today's to tomorrow. Don't know how long the DMV will take anyway.
I write less about injury recovery because it's boring, tedious and frustrating, and makes me sad to reflect on. I think enough about how to care for it and minimize further injury throughout the day. The wound feels disturbing in its pointlessness, because I know I have little if any control over things that happen in general. The constant injury is like a symbol of this unchanging fact. I write more about the other crap because it's fascinating and exciting. Experiencing controlled pain in s&m feels bizarre in this beautiful way and makes me glad to be alive. It makes me feel alive instead of half-killed, and like I'm a part of my body instead of both floating outside and shrunken away from the interior boundary at once. I'm otherwise so far away like in a dream and it's been this way for many years. The sense of control over the intense sensation makes me feel realigned within myself. reviewing these entries I see this fractalline pattern emerging in the relationship between "uncontrolled" and "controlled" pain. of course they're not entirely separate things but my concept of them being so creates this dynamic tension where the perceived experience of one affects how i think of the other. With self-injury you follow the logic of shame into repression, accruing damage by blinding yourself to your feelings or needs. To face the shame or sublimate it into a broader schematic it can be turned into something egosyntonic and strengthen my sense of placement or belonging in the world. s&m can be used to soothe the primal wound that's the font of the intense shame that led me towards annihilation and separation from the body.
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7/6/2026 7;37PM Busy day full of errands and phonecalls. Drinking tap water. My good foot is a little better. It's hard to tell if the injured foot is getting any better or staying the same. Having restricted movement for so long has become really tiring, I'm almost winded by simple tasks. Walking short distances outside is a significant event for me and the limits I come up against make me feel claustrophobic, like I'll imminently be stranded. I miss being able to run and dance and should've done more of both.
Took a break both from writing here and solo s&m while my shoulder instability is aggravated by using my walking cane with my dominant hand. To make up for it I got my hands on a terrible rubber horsewhip. It's thick, heavy and the striking end is not much longer than a foot and a few inches. It's studded with little rounded rubber spikes. M tested it out on me and it bites brutally, it falls heavy and quiet and stings like a monster with concerningly little effort. I'm excited to acclimate to it after feeling frustrated for so long with the amount of effort required for her to get me to crumble with the tools we had on hand. It felt like I was asking for too much and still not getting enough. I had to bite a cloth gag so I wouldn't disturb the neighbors and for once I actually had to tap out, pretty quickly, and felt an intensely euphoric afterglow. The whip is also very visually intimidating, like a thorny vine made of black rubber. It feels how it looks. You barely have to try and it leaves nasty raised welts with every single stroke. My harsh and beautiful wooden paddle was my favorite for as long as I've had it but today this rubber horsewhip has taken its place as my favored implement. Maybe I shouldn't get too excited in these entries because that's not what they're about. Actually it is. It's just that I don't want to be writing porn here.
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6/30/2026 10;22PM June is just about over with. Drinking earl grey again. A little tired of it but it's lower caffeine than all the nice loose leaf I have and I've bed to get to some time. Foot's doing alright but I walked just a little too much today and I can feel it. Good foot is still not that good. I will figure out how to maintain its health.
In therapy for my mental today I tried to broach the topic of my experience of pain being something that distracts from and minimizes other sources of suffering as a temporary reprieve, when I'm ill I can't attack myself with my mind. What I'm capable of thinking about is physically limited. My therapist didn't really have anything to say when I connected this to the pattern of self injury, besides to steer away and remind me that I have better, healthier coping mechanisms. And sure, of course. I worked on it for many years. I don't know. A person would hope not to feel the need to cut themself when they feel sad but relying on less forceful ways of "looking away" can hurt you too. There's only so much rationalizing and radical acceptance one can put up with until you need a little vice and I think it does someone well to know that about themself instead of seeing it as a personal failing to repress. If you "look away" from something like that it can become unsafe. Therapists are usually good at telling you to repress your feelings until inevitable meltdown and then making you blame yourself by describing the meltdown as avoidable if you just repressed it better. I don't think they usually realize it though. I'm amazed at the discrepancy between my relationship with uncontrolled/accidental injury vs. controlled application of pain. Especially when it comes to harm inflicted by other people, the difference between recieving abuse and getting thrashed by someone I trust because I asked her to and I know she's the one who can really do it right this time. Relatedly there's something else worth wondering about the line between self injury committed reactively in reflexive avoidance, and masochistic behavior that is stoked by sexuality, desire or pleasure-seeking. What makes them so different? Sometimes it looks like nothing but it feels like something vital. It feels like it's something to do with trust, in yourself and anyone else tasked with striking. I had a nice evening taking somewhere over 300 lashes with the sisal whip tonight, again before my shower. It's hard not to lose count when I get really into it. It has a stinging bite if you push it. Since I'm using this implement more often and understanding better how it handles I increased the force and frequency as I passed the hundred mark. This longer and more involved session was really satisfying. I can still feel it hours later, It raised some tiny welts and feels like there's some superficial bruising beneath them. I think because of the microabraisons from the rope fibers the welts are almost itchy like a rash, good and nastylike. While it is uncomfortable it barely hurts at all and I'd really like a whipping that lasts.
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6/29/2026 10;03PM Therapy felt good, the tightness had improved today but it's returning in the neck and shoulder as I sit idle and the night advances. Foot's still swollen but the stabbing pain is less frequent. I gave myself one hundred lashes with the sisal whip this evening, before my shower. I would have liked another hundred but we had plans that I didn't want to delay. Maybe tomorrow. It would be nice if the falls of the tails were heavier so it was easier to leave lasting welts, but the very light heft of the rope allows me to lash myself more without having to stop before I get hurt too badly. It's something that rewards you for taking your time with it. It's safer and the slow endorphin build up it affords is also very satisfying, it can seriously sting even though it's so lightweight.
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6/29/2026 12;33PM An hour before it's time to go to physical therapy. Drinking earl grey. M made a lovely breakfast of scrambled eggs, bacon and toast. I dreamed last night a very enjoyable dream, and the first dream I've dreamt of this apartment in the year since moving here. I dreamed that my jaw ached, I looked in the mirror and my molar was turning black. I walked to the dentist for an emergency visit, and before they started working on me they put me in a medical straitjacket. They did not let me out of it and I wandered aimlessly through town instead of heading directly home because I was energized and soothed by the experience of being stuck in the restraint. It was very exciting and pleasant, and it's funny how it sounds like a nightmare when I describe it. I woke up in an excellent mood and I'm going to be thinking about it all day. It's funny that I mentioned wanting to turn this into a dream diary and then I go to bed and immediately have a dream that suits the actually-established focus of this journal.
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6/28/2026 11:47PM Unwellness and fatigue. Start seated weightlifting. When I feel bad enough the prospect of s&m is almost nauseating.
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6/28/2026 1;03AM Considering how else to systematize these entries or if they should be at all. I felt like there should be some order to them hence the words, demarcation, themes. A dream diary? Already partly stream-of-conscious though forced through a frustrated and self-correcting sieve. I have already made this page into something specific that continues to solidify.
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6/27/2026 8;33PM Emotionally unwell. Drinking mi xiang jin luo. Regretting reaching out to people, feeling stupid for it. Woke recently from a bad dream about insane family, deep neck ache. Stabbing pain both feet. I would like to draw or make music but the pain is demoralizing when I also feel very little about the things I make to begin with. They're mostly things I've spent so much time on because I did not have friends to talk to, and the emptiness it causes has started to dwarf the value I get from my current process/approach to art. It makes my drawings look terrifying. I've been thinking about how I never felt a sense of community or ingratiation into a friend group and it helps to realize that a sense of community is an illusion that people maintain to help us feel safer and like we can trust each other. A community is just however many individuals trying to do whatever they think should be done despite never being able to truly understand each other. True understanding or pure communication is never reached between people so long as we're all individuated. We all share this state of unknowing and in this way no one is a stranger but in another sense that's the most we can be to each other. When my new friend stopped responding to me last week I felt so stupid but I know it can mean anything, so I should let it just mean nothing. Sometimes I leave someone hanging because I don't know what to say and then I build up the significance of my response in my head, getting frozen in a warped idea and I drive myself away from connection like that. Happens all the time. It's hard to feel like I'm a permanent stranger to the world but I've been questioning the accuracy of that feeling and recognizing it as resulting from isolation's effects. M spanked me with her newly-sanded wooden spatula today and it was intensely arousing. I can't stop thinking about it.
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6/26/2026 12;06AM Doing a lot of "remote socializing" this week. Chatted with a new friend, group meeting, group movie viewing. It's tiring like a workout, it felt like something was atrophying for a long time. Whenever I start socializing again my sleeping dreams take on a differentness. Like something vital getting reinforced with purposeful, careful direction.. I usually dream of no one else, speaking to no one, but I talk to others and then people suddenly appear. There's more color too. The pain's gotten better tonight. Going to stretch, massage and shower before winding down. I haven't eaten enough today.
6/25/2026 2;10PM Laying down hurting. Either sitting at my desk or using the massage gun on my foot yesterday made my entire right side feel like a vice turning down on itself as my left accordions outward. Good foot is starting to ache from overuse. Laptop up on my legs, drawing with tablet.
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6/24/2026 8;44PM Two appointments today. Entire right side is tight from foot to skull. Made a new page on my page-page and I'm drinking bi luo chun. Chatted with M about causality yesterday. Months ago I was reading a book about natural radiation, I read a caption about insects behaving reflexively in response to stimuli using signal reception via antennae and had been paralytically horrified by the sudden image of being only an impulse travelling along a nerve stretching through space by time: I described it to her and she asked me how else could anyone feel love or meaning otherwise, outside a causal chain? Why would you ever feel or love anything without cause, and how? You need reasons to love and the more reasons you have the deeper and more meaningful it becomes. From the unknowable depth of the chain we can draw any meaning we can find. She talked about how she thought of that conversation often. Hung around the medical park today staring at the big blue buildings and the lovely clouds. Feeling good about the group meeting but feeling the usual regret. Listening to Masayoshi Takanaka's All of Me. Enjoying the summer despite being housebound and lingering on the idea of the perfect gimp suit: rubber, loose-fitting, lending ambiguity. Fitted with straps for ease of restraint. What is it like to be the kind of person who can walk around outside like that? The "unfeeling" quality of the universe/chain allows us to experience what seems like free will. It's a scary vastness, I always wish I could just float on the wind. Since I can't, the next best thing is being strapped down. Wear it against my skin and let it decide how I move. There's not that far of a difference.
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