‘Twas the night before Christmas….

I splashed on some Old Spice, grabbed the bottles of wine I would be gifting the host of the party I was going to, and hustled out to my carport to fire up the truck. And then I heard the meow.

It wasn’t just a regular Meow.

It was one of those long, plaintive, please-I-need-help meows.

And it was coming, apparently, from my truck. This caused me a moment of consternation, since none of the drugs I dabbled in as a youth cause flashbacks and, to the best of my knowledge, Ford Rangers don’t meow - or at least not with the options package I got.

The meow came again, and this time a bedraggled ball of dingy white fur stepped out from underneath my truck to claim it.

Her fur was all tangled and dirty, there were fleas poking out of her, and she was lactating - there was more teat than cat.

I set up a box for her in the carport filled with towels and got her bowls of food and water. She scarfed the food down gobbled some water, and then went to my door and meowed to get in.

The neighbors and I spent the next few days watching her - she’d lay down and sleep in the box, eat and drink, and go to our doors meowing to get in. No wandering off to take care of kittens. I called my vet and talked it over and she said at that point we probably wouldn’t find any kittens - they were dead or abandoned or whatever.

So - several hundred dollars of exams, shots, tests, and a spaying later:

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I decided to call her Amata - which means “Beloved” in Esperanto.  So tonight Amata is wandering around the apartment exchanging Don’t Mess With Me/That’s MY Spot on the Sofa hisses with Pishi and Gata (my two other cats) and enduring the occasional sniffing/tongue bath from the dog.

I think perhaps that we spanking folks are a slightly Americanized ethnic (Mexican, Transylvanian, Lilliputian, whatever) restaurant.

Bear (or bare) with me - this has been bubbling around in my brain for a while trying to find a way out. Radagast just posted something about how “seriously” people take/get-into various kinks (what level they take it to, if you will) and it jived closely enough with what I was thinking that it set my words loose - for good or ill.

People don’t walk around in normal vanilla offices joking about catherine wheels, bullwhips, bondage cuffs, or St. Andrew’s Crosses. They DO joke, tease, play, and fool around with spanking. Even people who were not spanked as kids do it. Not everyone, obviously, and not all the time, but it’s certainly not a shock in workplaces I’ve been in to hear someone tease another with the threat of a spanking or even give a playful slap on the butt.

I’ve heard the spanking crowd described as “a subset” or a “type” of the bdsm lifestyle - and while we are, I don’t know that that’s quite how vanilla folks look at it - I think they look at more like a “level” - i.e. we’re the first step away from Vanilla and toward BDSM. Conrev (and similar stores) won’t sell you any hardcore implements, but you can buy a fuzzy little paddle for some spanking play.

Back to the restaurant analogy. There are Mexican, Transylvanian, and Lilliputian restaurants here in S. California (okay, more Mexican than anything else but I’m trying to be diverse) that look like little dumpy holes in the wall down some small little street - and they have the most authentic and incredible food you’re likely to find in the States.  They are often heavily patronized by the ethnic group in question and while I’ve never had a problem wading right in, some people find such places uncomfortable - some folks can’t/won’t deal with a place so completely steeped in Other Culture.  Down the street, though, is a more Americanized chain restaurant serving the same basic cuisine - but the staff all speak English fluently, they have cute descriptive English names for the dishes (”Transylvanian Tacos” instead of Hashbah Gael Takani Whampa - which translates as “young goat testicals sauteed and wrapped in flat bread”), and the waitresses shave their armpits.

That second restaurant is, I think, what us spankos are - at least to the vanilla crowd. We’re a “safer”, more familiar bridge from “their” world into the world of the Kinky People. They may never engage in anything resembling bdsm but if they do, we’re the place they’re most likely to come to - or at least come to first. Ping Pong paddles are more familiar and less exotic and scary than bullwhips and electrodes - and with six cane strokes you get eggroll.