Penny moaned. The red-haired business manager just calculated the time span of her enforced no-smoking for her spur-of-the-moment out-of-town conference. “Thursday I won’t be able to smoke for at least fourteen hours.” Depressed, she pondered, “That’s how long I’ll be in the air, in taxis and presenting our strategy to ‘corporate’ while conferring with our clients.”
Leah’s boots indent the pristine snow with her footfalls trudging to the picnic table blanketed with three inches in this suburban recreational park. Before she sits down to enjoy the view of the vacant skating pond, her wooly mittens whisk off mounded flakes from the bench, while she jets clouds of steam from her mouth in this 20 degree weather. This New Year’s Eve afternoon snowfall is at its most intent so of course the grey cloudy ceiling overhead is accentuated by aimless luminous spots dropping over every available surface, even Leah’s caramel-colored woolen cap framing the face of what she’s been frequently reminded is a Cate Blanchet look.
For today’s special event, Leslie drives to Countywide Community College for today’s open air seminar dressed as ‘the woman in-touch with nature’; the theme-appropriate look for the topics under discussion: ‘inner awareness and consciousness raising’. She brushed her shoulder-length brunette hair arrow-straight with only a few fly-away strands. Her green eyes are overarched with chestnut hue eyebrows plucked to a thin, long comet shape. Leslie’s loose and open black dress off-sets her fire-engine red nails to perfection. Her muted mauve lipstick actually diminishes her deliciously full lips.
The master of the topgallant crew sang out the command “heave” at intervals and thus the deck hands drew in bight after bight until the last of the sail was hauled in and made flat over the yard. To secure the salt-crusted bundle they wrapped it with hemp cords and “made fast” to the jackstay, that metal rod protruding a few inches above the spar for a handgrip and anchoring post.
This is a brief excerpt from the September–October 2010 issue of Smoke Signals magazine, and one of my first columns for the free/public version, "My First Decade at The Orgy":
Boardhost shut down my forum and multimedia archive near the end of March because they recently implemented a ban on smoking and fetish content. Way back in 2000 when I opened the first incarnation of "Sublime," I asked the then owner of Boardhost (who was pretty much a one man band at the time) if he had any problems with SF content. He told me flatly that he absolutely did not.
La petite mort is French for "the little death." The expression is most often used to describe the experience of having an orgasm, but is also used to describe the release of emotional energy (catharsis) that accompanies experiencing the climax of a creative expression, as well as the experience of going through a shocking life-changing event.
