Introduction: Annie Blackbird

"But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.
"Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat: "we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad."
"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.
"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here."
--Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

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Hello, readers of Arachne's Web. Annie Blackbird here. Miriam asked me a while back if I would like to make the occasional guest post to this blog, and I said yes before I had really thought about it. Then I thought about it, and thus ensued the few months' delay between the time of her asking and the time of this writing.

You see, I'm not a rope person. I appreciate the aesthetics of rope bondage, as well as its functionality when it's intended to be functional, but for me, the return isn't often worth the effort. I don't have much experience at all with rope of any kind, and right now it simply takes me too damn long to rig everything the way I want it. By the time I've finished, I've usually lost the momentum of the scene, which is entirely counterproductive, at least to my way of thinking. And therefore, at least for the time being, I don't think of myself as a rope person.

I am, however, an experienced witchy-type person, a stealth queer (by which I mean that I am a bisexual woman whose primary partner is a heterosexual man: I'm not visibly queer when we go out for a walk together), and a dyed-in-the-wool kinkster. With regards to the latter, I've been a top all my life; I was a dominant sadist, as per Midori's excellent definitions of both terms, long before I knew what either of those words meant, or even what sex was. These days this part of my life is lots of fun, now that I like who I am: I have a wonderful partner who complements me in all the ways that matter, many supportive friends, a healthy local kink community, a membership to a truly excellent play space, and a lot of fun toys (all of them of inanimate natures, at least thus far) to play with. I even switch with my partner on rare occasions, which is a thing I hadn't ever considered before we got together. Life is very good.

In any case, to return to my point: there's more than one way to be a spider, and more than one way to put spider silk to good use. I'm more of a wolf spider than an orb-weaver type, but I like to think that I'm at least as skilled at weaving the web of closeness and connection between my partner and myself, or between myself and others, or between one community and another, as any other spider out there. Thus, this introduction; thus, this writing. May it help to bring together those things that are meant to come together.