Guest post: A Flowering of Sorts

Cloud invited me to guest blog (a major compliment), so I’ll try to keep this interesting.  She was the grand dame of Tribalectic when I first tentatively described my first piercing years ago, and she remains an ornery, insightful broad whose thoughts amuse, inspire, and inform.

My experience in the piercing community is that its members tend to be thoughtful, sensitive, even cautious.  Many, if not most, shows signs of empathy, and welcome whatever happiness or grief is re-membered, as in put back together, by their fellow community members.

By no means are all piercers or piercees suffering souls.  There are some folks just intersted in a better way to get off.  Will my tongue stud make her jizz?  You know what I mean.

But, there is that segment of the population which has been wounded in mind, or heart or spirit.  Something private and personal has been taken away, stolen, defiled.  It could be a beaten spouse.  It could be a raped adult or child.  It could be the jackass boss who never lets you be what you want to be.

When your identity has been stolen away, you can either give in or you can reclaim yourself.  Your pain is your pain.  How you ornament yourself is your choice.  Who you share yourself with is your choice. Piercing, for some, allows you to reclaim your body.  It’s mine, not yours you assmunch! In my eyes, this is a beautiful project a flowering of sorts, where you reclaim your body and let it grow from there.

Never let bad memories hold you back.

Namaste.

-pdbsg

Did you see that?

Piercing as Architecture

Flickr has been my friend and assistant in my blogging venture.  You just never know what you’re going to find.  Like this pic of a building in downtown Torino Italy.  It’s pierced, and . . . it’s bleeding! This comes from agd82’s photostream, and this is the information that’s posted about the building:

You can see blood spilling from the piercing: red blood and blue one. The red one is supposed to come from normal people, the blue one from the aristocracy. This to show that in the past those building were rich aristocrats and now by common people.

And here I thought it was just an advertisement for a piercing studio, and it turns out to be social commentary. Some further digging indicates that this was an installation done by a group of young Turinese architects under the aegis of Corrado Levi, an Italian artist, architect, and professor. Pretty cool!

You can see another shot of it lit up at night here.

fin

Two for Tuesday

Yesterday, I had my biggest day of viewers on my blog so far,  so thanks to all my readers!

A couple of items for your reading pleasure today:

I got a nice note from a piercer in Newcastle, Australia, via my IAM page on BME, who said:

Hey Cloud. Your blog is really going well I see.  I want to say how much I enjoy checking it out. You  have a real way of conveying the information so its easy to understand. . .  An awesome resources site.  I have started to let my clients know about it. “

Wow.  I’m blushing! Thanks, Greg! So if any of you are reading me from Australia, give a shout out.

Second, for men with genital piercings, there’s a survey you can take part in. The group doing this survey is the same one which has done a study of VCH (Vertical Clitoral Hood) piercings in women, so it’s legit.

I urge you to support academic and scientific research about body piercing when you can, so here’s the link to participate in this survey:

Men With Genital Piercings Survey

It’s my understanding that it’s composed of basic questions about piercing and your lifestyle. Thanks once again to Elayne Angel for posting about this study on her blog.  I’m waiting with bated breath for the book’s  release, Elayne!

Thanks to Tambako the Jaguar for the lemurs!