I'm clearly still learning my way around this Blogging business. (I'm not normally an early adopter of anything technological--I've still got a Betamax VCR I won't get rid of.) For one thing, I just spent half an hour composing an entry for this journal, only to have it disappear into the ether at the very minute I wanted it to materialize here. This is the second (nope, make that third/damn, FOURTH) time this has happened to me, and I'm trying hard to resist the temptation to dismantle my computer and hurl its innards against the wall.

I also just discovered from a Blogger how-to that apparently I can't currently invite other people to add comments directly to this blog. Grrrrrr. So as a back-up, I encourage you to e-mail me any remarks you'd like to post here, and I'll paste them in myself. (Even if you don’t want your feedback made public, I'd still love to hear from you.)

What kinds of things do I have in mind to discuss in this venue? Here are two biggies:

1. In my daylight/Bruce Wayne existence, I am a longtime lefty pacifist who abhors violence, including police brutality.Yet when I see images of a line of cops in full riot gear facing down a crowd of anti-war demonstrators (as happened on a daily basis around the world recently), I get weak in the knees. The protestors are my friends, metaphorically and sometimes literally, and I have stood with them every chance I've had to do so -- but the sight of baton-wielding officers decked out in shin guards, face masks, sap gloves and Dehner boots is enough to make me cream. Does anybody else reading this feel a similar conflict between personal politics and sexual desire? How do you reconcile yourself to the disconnect between your head and your cock (or other genital of choice)?

2. When I first started donning a batsuit of my own in the wee hours of the night, I thought of it mainly as a sexual act. And it still is, although for the last year or so it has come to feel more like a form of spiritual practice. When I pull off my sweat-soaked mask at the end a long session of what I call "batsex" or "batplay" (though sometimes it's a cop uniform), I feel a peace of mind more powerful than anything I've ever experienced. I've heard S/M-ers speak of achieving a kind of transcendence at the peak of a scene, and I completely understand what they're talking about. Anybody else out there have any similar stories to share? (Given my circle of daylight friends, it's pretty much as hard to come out as a spiritual person as it is to come out as a fetishist -- the taboo against bringing up god in my part of America often seems as strong as the one against dressing up like a superhero or privately impersonating an officer.)

More to be said on both these topics, but I'd better get this much posted before the blogmonster eats it all again...