I unlocked Lion last night. We weren’t able to really snuggle. Lion hurt his arm when he went to PT and just touching it sent him into orbit. By the time I played with him he wasn’t all that interested. I’m not sure he was really all that interested, to begin with. As he said, it was only six days since his orgasm. Still, I tried. And I did get him hard but no further. That’s fine. As long as it felt good to him and we had some time together.


Even though we weren’t really able to snuggle I stayed close. We held hands when I couldn’t maintain my almost-snuggle position. It’s true that we haven’t been as close as usual for the past week or so. I’ll have to make sure we stay close from now on.


A few days ago, Lion lost a crown. I suggested he make his dentist appointment on Wednesday since he has PT very close to the dentist’s office. Last night he said they offered him an appointment today and he should have taken it because his tooth hurt. This morning I checked in to see if he’d tried to get the appointment today and he said he’d wait till Wednesday. I appreciate his trying not to take me away from work but I also don’t want him to be in pain unless I want him to be in pain. He laughed at me when I said that. But it’s true.


I don’t want his shoulder to hurt. He didn’t ask for that. The pain I cause is requested in some form or another. I know he doesn’t ask me directly to put Icy Hot on his balls. That’s a more subtle request. He’s asked me to play with him. Clothespins, tying his balls tightly and Icy Hot are all things I use to turn him on. He also asks indirectly to be punished. He doesn’t say he’s been a bad boy and deserves to be punished. He breaks rules. That signals his need to be punished.


I am definitely not saying he breaks a rule on purpose. But when he does it’s an indirect request to be punished…even though sometimes he might make a direct request not to be punished. Like a traffic cop who lets you go with a warning for speeding, I might let Lion off with a warning. However, the next time you go speeding past that cop, he’ll have his ticket book out when he walks up to the car. My paddle is my ticket book.


Lion has been a very good boy lately. He’s been remembering punishment day. He’s been getting the coffee ready for the next morning. He hasn’t been annoying me. Of course, this means his buns are forgetting how to take a beating. I guess I’ll have to rectify the situation with a maintenance spanking either tonight or tomorrow night. I have to keep both his buns and my arms in practice.


Whether I swat him tonight or not, we’ll have some snuggle time and Lion fun time even if it doesn’t go any further than getting him hard. After all, I have to keep my weenie in practice too.

Lion's spanked butt
Lion asks me how red I made his butt. I tell him that I don’t have a standard. However, this is a color I’ve produced in the past. Maybe we should print this picture as a comparison so that I can achieve consistent redness every time I spank him.

I went back to using the camper paddle last night. It drew some blood but I think that’s only because the other paddle opened the skin the night before. There’s really no way to avoid those areas with daily spanking. Lion said I should avoid bruised areas too. Again, I’m not sure how that will work. His butt is not that big. [Lion — It’s not an absolute safety rule to avoid bruises, but it’s a good idea.]

I’ve been varying things a bit. I’m not sure how it’s working because Lion said I’ll know when I’m hitting too hard because he’ll try to get away. Sometimes I do a flurry of hard swats. Sometimes I do a flurry of lighter swats. Then I do harder swats with time between them. He says I shouldn’t wait so long between swats. I figured I was making him think about each hard swat when I did them slowly. I guess not. Or maybe I need to do super hard swats with time between them so he can think about them. [Lion — Uh huh.]

Ultimately, it’s my decision how hard or soft to hit, how fast or slow to go, and how many swats he winds up getting. I haven’t been counting. I go until I think he’s gotten the message. How do I know? It’s all guesswork. I really have no idea how sore his butt is or what’s going on in his mind. He could be thinking he’s gotten the message by the second barrage of swats and he just wishes I’d stop so he can nurse his wounds. In reality, he’s probably thinking I should hit harder and keep going until I can’t raise my arm any more. [Lion — Nuh Uh]

The other day, we were talking about pain. I said I wish I knew how much pain he was in from his shoulder. He wondered why. People feel pain differently and I wonder if his pain on a scale of one to ten is a six would feel more like eight or four to me. I live with chronic pain so I assume I feel acute pain differently. I have no basis in fact for that. The other thing is that I’m used to “playing through the pain”. I played soccer and quite frequently I’d feel an injury some time after the actual injury occurred. I always chalked that up to adrenaline. But I wonder if it’s the same with chronic pain versus acute pain.

At any rate, Lion said it wouldn’t be a good idea to use that ability to feel the pain of a spanking. I hadn’t thought of it, but I do wonder why. If I know that his six is my eight, then I might know when he was approaching his limit. I guess it wouldn’t be fair, for one. I could push him more than he wants to be pushed. Or I could stop sooner than he wants me to. Regardless, I was just interested in general pain, not punishment pain. [Lion — I don’t want to control how much I am pushed or when Mrs. Lion stops. That’s up to her.]

There are many kinds of pain. There’s the welcome kind that comes with BDSM play. When skillfully administered, this pain will eventually produce an endorphin high. This state is frequently referred to as “Sub Space”. Recreational torture isn’t the only way to attain this endocrine high. Runners get it after a long, exhausting jog. Hard physical labor can also produce it. Initially, when the pain starts it may not be fun, but as the brain chemicals catch up the sensations actually start to feel pleasant.

Then, there’s chronic pain. Many of us suffer some of this. It’s that unrelenting ache that just won’t stop. Intensity can range from annoying to debilitating. A great deal of opioid dependency arises from trying to manage chronic pain. Mrs. Lion suffers from some aches in her joints and frequent headaches. She muscles through them, rarely using medication. She has some and will, on occasion use it to help her cope. I’m fortunate I don’t suffer from chronic pain. By rights, my neck should hurt. In fact, the usual reason people go to the doctor and end up getting a kind of surgery I’ll be getting, is that they have chronic neck pain.

In fact when I went for my meeting with the neurosurgeon, I was asked to fill out a form. I can only answer one or two questions. There were 10 or 12 that cover a history of physical therapy and drugs used to manage the chronic pain that supposedly brought the patient to the surgeon.

There’s more exotic kinds of pain. One most of us have experienced is the pain of injury. My most vivid memory of this is how badly I hurt after I fell and tore my rotator cuff. The pain was unrelenting and so severe I couldn’t sleep. I endured it with gaps created by drugs and cortisone shots for six months. Then I got the surgery to correct it.

That brings me to more exotic examples. Surgical pain  is the result of having a procedure done that cuts into the body. There are actually two kinds as far as I can tell. The first is the pain of the actual wound created by the surgeon scalpel. In my experience, this is fairly short-lived. After the rotator cuff surgery, the surgical wound pain was gone after about a week. I’m told that the wound pain from my spinal surgery will be largely gone in 2 to 3 days.

The second kind of surgical pain lasts much longer. This is caused by the insults to the body inflicted by the surgery. It’s hard to generalize what causes this pain. In the case of my rotator cuff surgery, it was related to the stretching and reattaching of my tendon. This pain lasted over a year. Of course, there was much worse for the first four or five months. In my case, I was given opioids to deal with the pain. After only a few weeks, the opioids stopped working. I had a hard time finding anything that could alleviate this pain after that.

I’m told to expect at least two months of neck pain after the spinal operation. Apparently, according to the surgeon, it’s worse for the first few weeks. Then, it supposedly controllable with over-the-counter pain medication. I don’t get any comfort from this. Because I am taking a blood thinner, I can’t use aspirin, ibuprofen, or other similar drugs. They can cause bleeding in the stomach which would be fatal when blood thinners are being taken. I decided to be aggressive about managing this. I’m getting an appointment with the pain management team at the hospital to work out a strategy to support me after my surgery.

In the worst case I’ll stop taking the blood thinners so that I can use anti-inflammatory medication. My cardiologist absolutely opposes this. I am at risk for a stroke if not taking that medicine. This is one of those situations where calculated risk is needed. I’ve never had any stomach problems taking anti-inflammatory drugs, so my risk may not be as high as it would be for others.

There are other kinds of pain such as unwelcome trauma. But I don’t think they manifest differently than the ones I’ve already talked about. I’ve known a couple of people who suffered from horrible, painful, eventually-fatal diseases. They used BDSM pain as a distraction from the much more serious pain of their diseases. Since after my surgery there isn’t any restriction on my motion, maybe we can experiment with the kind of distraction I would get from Mrs. Lion’s skillful spankings. Will I forget about my neck when my butt is burning? I see another experiment coming.

state fair
Lion and I are off to the fair today.

Lion had physical therapy yesterday. Sometimes it makes him feel better. Other times it makes him hurt. Last night was the latter. When I told him it was time for his punishment he said he didn’t feel sexy. I said it was lucky for him that punishment didn’t require him to feel sexy. But as I was swatting him I realized just how much pain he was in. I made his buns pink but not as pink as I might have if I hadn’t been trying to get his shoulder more comfortable.

We snuggled for a while. I found a position that didn’t wrench my neck while watching TV. I fondled my weenie and the boys for a bit. I wasn’t trying to get him hard but if it happened it was fine. I just wanted to make Lion feel good. After about an hour Lion needed to move his shoulder around so we held hands and continued to watch TV.

I suppose I could have made him sit in the corner after his swats. That wouldn’t have put any pressure on his shoulder. But I didn’t want him to be in any more pain than he already was. I was trying to make him comfortable. Sitting in the corner wouldn’t have accomplished anything at that point. His attention wouldn’t have been on his butt anyway. The good news is that this morning most of the shoulder pain is gone.

In a little while we’ll head out to the state fair. It’s fun to walk through the vendor areas with the barkers telling people how their lives will be enriched if they just buy this ladder or that massage chair. And when’s the last time you had your gutters cleaned? New windows perhaps? We’ve gone to concerts in the past and even a rodeo at the fair. We’ll get our fudge and maybe some cotton candy. We’ll look at the animals and watch the chainsaw woodcarvers. Mostly it’s fun just to walk around together.