Feasting Times

Being a child of the southern hemisphere, this is the way I have made this season work for me:

The Solstice, the ending and beginning of the solar year, is on the 21st or 22nd (depending on the year, where you are, and whether you're counting the astronomical moment or the closest dawn or sunset). Solstice is important. It doesn't need additional spiritual or commercial elements to make it important: it just is. The length of days, the amount of light in the world, is what gives rhythm to life and growth. When that rhythm reaches its midsummer peak, we live festively, loudly, communally. We are outdoors a lot. Life is full of sunlight.

A thing that I like to do on or near the Solstice is this: to write down some things I have learned (a year is a good period of time for reflection), and then burn them, and let the ashes scatter in the sunlight. Then, maybe, write down some things I would like to keep in mind for the coming year, and put the list somewhere safe to revisit next year. This isn't a religious ritual. It's a personal ritual of reflection and letting go.

On the 25th of December there is a feast day. We eat lavishly, there are exchanges of gifts, we try to spend our time with the people we most love, or the people who make up our (born or chosen) families. This particular date is a religious and commercial festival, but it has been many different kinds of festivals for many different kinds of people, and it falls nicely in the midsummer season. Conveniently, most people have the day off, so they are available for feasting together. Houses decorated with sparkling lights and parcels wrapped in pretty papers are nice things, in the festival times.

The ending and beginning of the calendar year is the climax of this midsummer feasting time. We dress up gorgeously and celebrate wildly with fireworks and all-night dancing, to greet the dawn of the new year tired and rumpled and full of adventures.

Frills and bows and lovely horrors

In the immense and varied library of kinks and fetishes that have popped up in my life, there is the gas mask. I love them (LOVE THEM) but don't play with them with other people so very often. I have done- they were a pretty frequent part of my repertoire when I was living in San Francisco. But not since then, really, and four years is a pretty long time for a favourite thing to not be pulled out for play.

I think I don't play with them with other people often because I find it hard to articulate what it is about them that I love. They don't immediately invite an action or suggest a mood or character. They are quite abstract. "I like gas masks" gives less direct information than "I like being spanked". And the way I enjoy them doesn't even have a direct correlation to activity. It's not "I love to wear gas masks and get fucked" or "I love to wear gas masks and then be tied up". I just love them.

I do play with them alone, but what does that even mean? I don't play with them as in set up elaborate auto-erotic scenarios featuring gas masks. I just wear them, and enjoy them, and try to figure out what it is about it I'm enjoying. It reminds me a bit of when I first got my pony boots, and I used to put them on when I was alone and just feel the changes in my body and my stance and how that shifted my thoughts and my headspace.

There are two divergent directions i feel myself go in when I am wearing a gas mask. One is the monstrous little girl- pink and ruffles and pigtails and Hello Kitty doll, but faceless and abject- absent- horrifying. The only human part of my face is my eyes, trapped behind huge glass disks. I love inhabiting this space. When I didn't have my gas mask with me I once went to a play party in ruffled socks, mary janes, cute polka dot underwear and a full-face executioner's mask. That particular space is such a powerful expression to me of what I do, what I am with my femmeness and my little-girlness. On display, and for looking at, and designed for touching and taking- but there is something very weird in there. Exercise caution. Teeth lurk where you may not expect them. That's always true, but blanking out and making weird my face makes it explicit. It makes me feel like a fucking fierce pervert, instead of 'just' the object of somebody else's perversion.

The other self that comes out in gas masks, sometimes, is this funny sweet playful beast. Four-legged and strange of face, like a tapir perhaps, or something more feline. I have had merry, merry hours stalking and lounging and pouncing between legs and seats and furniture. Or being locked into cages and batting at fingers or strings dangled through the bars. Very different beast-space to pony-space. Not very performative, not even especially fetishistic- the mask serves the purpose of dehumanizing enough to slip into that space, takes away mouth and voice quite conveniently, warps vision as though my eyes have become alien, concentrates the scents in the air as though I have a snake-like ability to taste them. I haven't gotten to spend very much time in that space, I think because it's hard to ask for (how to negotiate a scene like "actually can you just put the gas mask on me and react as though I am adorable when I start chasing your shoe laces?" Do-able, I guess, but it hasn't come up. From memory most times I've done it it's been negotiated as my reward for performing well during a submissive or masochist scene).

I am interested in how the gas mask changes my perception of the world from within it. How the world looks different through those glass disks, how the air tastes different, how breath becomes more measured. It acts as blinders on a horse, narrowing the field of vision and increasing the focus on what is directly ahead. It is a little like being underwater, or perhaps being a marine animal venturing onto the shore, an alien landing where the atmosphere has a strange density and toxic make-up. And being perceived as alien, and unlovely, hits some switch inside me that feels like freedom. Like being decorative on my own terms, and within my control.

It's also play for play's sake- play for shifting a perception of the world, and existing in it differently, rather than play for sexual or endorphin gratification. Sexual and endorphin gratification being fine things, of course. But I like other types of play, too.

Australia

I'm sitting, sweating, in a room in the house I used to live at in Sydney. It is like a homecoming that I am trying frantically to deny, or derail (this isn't home, although it is beautiful and familiar and filled with love). Tonight was spectacular, one of those surprisingly rare but so very iconic Sydney nights where the temperature stays at 32C until midnight, when a thunderstorm growls through and pushes the heat out with the anticipated southerly change. In this high-up little room at the back of the house, with all the windows open, I can smell the fat hot drops of rain meeting the cooked dirt, and feel the whisper of cooler breezes just beginning to supersede the hot, dry winds of the day. It is beautiful, and known, and sings to me of 26 years of remembered summers.

I am stirring to life again, sort-of, after being absolutely slaughtered by jet lag for the first week after I landed. I had no idea it could be so bad (last time I guess I sidestepped it by spending a week in Thailand halfway here). Worse again for a 12 hour delay in my flight, pushing transit-hell out to a 36 hour ordeal and 2 entire missed nights of sleep. I landed, hugged my friends, bolted for the beach, came home and collapsed into an 18 hour sleep. Then did essentially the same routine (beach, 18 hours of sleep, beach, 18 hours of sleep) for most of the week. It's a nice way to be, in this city, at this time of year.

Oh Sydney, you funny old town. I am not settled into being here. Half-holiday half-homecoming is a strange way to be somewhere. I offer some resistance to being swept up into the same life I had before I left, but that resistance is mostly brushed cheerfully aside. It's hard to hold a boundary in the face of a city that knows how to pick up my strings and play me along in one very particular dance of myself.

When I was in Berlin and I reached for moments of my Sydney self to keep me strong, I always came back to the marine experience: face-down in the ocean, breathing plastic-scented air through a tube, pushing hard off from the rocks and communing with darting fish and swirling kelp. Here, when I think of Berlin, I think of riding (of course), riding through the grey Autumn light, grinning fiercely, fingers frozen to the handlebars, feeling elated and alone with bare trees and brusque strangers. It is a shock to the system to go from one to the other so fast. There is something so brutal- brutal the way that surgery is brutal- about packaging yourself into a metal tube in the sky to swap one hemisphere and season for another in a matter of days. One or the other experience feels like a dream- Sydney or Berlin- I can't figure out which, though.

Berlin-London-Sydney

I've surprised the hell out of myself by just having a really lovely few days in London. Stayed at my friend's flat in Dalston for two nights, spent the days finishing up some work from Berlin and watching the rain stream down the windows, the nights hanging out. Then the last night with a different friend, who still had a suitcase of my things lurking in her loungeroom, so I spent a night packing, re-packing, taking the measure of the things that quantify my material reality.

Surprised because I hadn't even pictured enjoying London, hadn't projected it into any kind of expectation. It was just there, the necessary pit-stop between my beautiful, desolate desert-island existence in Berlin and the bright whirl & energy of my life in Sydney (that I am squinting away from and dreading, in advance). And then it was lovely, actually. Lovely to see those friends and have those conversations and curl up in grey apartments watching grey skies and grey squirrels and relentless rain.

Leaving Berlin is every bit as much of a headfuck as I had anticipated. From the outside, now, by contrast, I can see things, like: Berlin's incredible, comfortable, Eastern European daggyness. The lack of gloss, of style. London did my head in, so matched-up and immaculately dressed and expensively coiffed. Even the queers, even my people. And the thick lacquer of money everywhere in London, a shock after gritty-poor Berlin.

24 hours or so of transit hell, now, then Sydney. Where a beautiful little ginger-and-white cat is now buried under rocks in the backyard of my old house, which breaks my heart. I will buy a bottle of gin duty free & toast to his memory. He was a good cat. He will be missed.