Vincent Zandri's Blog - Posts Tagged "spanking"
Spanking: A Confession
The following essay is now appearing at The Vincent Zandri Vox: http://vincentzandri.blogspot.com/201...
I was just about fed up with the spanking debate that's tackled NFL football, in particular Adrian Peterson of the Minnesota Vikings who, in the wake of the Ray Rice-left-hook-to-finacee's-jaw debacle, was sidelined after it was learned he spanked his four-year old with a switch. Apparently spanking with a switch was enough to cause the child some bruising, which in and of itself is a little disturbing, especially now that so many football players have come to his defense stating that they too were spanked as kids with switches. Ouch!
I was spanked as a kid. But not with a switch. I wasn't beaten or punched or tossed out the door of a moving vehicle. But I was spanked. It seemed normal at the time because I can remember doing some really stupid things like ignoring my math homework for a couple of months which I most definitely did not do a second time after my dad learned about it and spanked me as a punishment (he took away my bedroom TV too which hurt a lot more). Lesson learned. And like my grandmother used to say, If God didn't want us to spank our children, he wouldn't have given them soft little bums.
Howard Kurtz at Fox News is reporting today that Chris Cuomo of CNN confessed to spanking his little boy. In fact, Cuomo goes a step further by saying he might have gotten too physical with the child on occasion and for this he is deeply apologetic and regretful. I would imagine that Chris, having grown up in an Italian American family, albeit a politically famous one, was also spanked. I can make that assumption since I too grew up in a mostly Italian American family. Italian dads, especially when overworked, can be real hotheads, myself included. It's also interesting to note that Cuomo and I attended the same private high school, The Albany Academy, where on more than one occasion I witnessed a teacher whalloping an out-of-line student. Prior to that, I attended a Roman Catholic grade school where I saw a blue habit-wearing nun literally punch the shit out of a bad kid. I remember the kid's name was David and I also remember that he was bully who tossed his weight around. That nun had a left hook that would have made Mike Tyson proud.
Later on, as I grew into adulthood, I was surprised to find that spanking would still play an important role in my life. Only this time, it wasn't as a punishment. It became a kind of fun thing to do behind closed doors with the girlfriend. A little spanking here and there could liven things up. Some of the spanks were far harder than they were when I was being punished but somehow, they felt way better.
Spanking added some real spice to an otherwise bland, foreplay-missionary sex-grab-me-a-beer-honey-while-your-up evening. And to be further honest, we'd inevitably have a good laugh over something that hurt so good.
For anyone who doesn't believe spanking should have a place in our adult lives think again. Check out these little online tidbit:
How to spank: Sensual spanking tips and tricks
Did you know that spanking a child is illegal in Germany, but spanking your girlfriend (or she spanking you), is entirely encouraged. I'm all for outlawing spanking with a switch. It seems a barbaric practice to me. But why then does a little light spanking with a leather whip between my sig other and myself seems so enticing?
Chris Cuomo shouldn't be so hard on himself. He should learn from his mistakes and embrace the other side of spanking. Adrian Peterson might do the same. Certainly, Ray Rice needs to learn that punching your fiancee out in an elevator is an act that deserves a spanking, but not the good kind.
Cracked.com reports that even famous geniuses like TE Lawrence of Arabia liked to be spanked. So did Percy Grainger, and so did Declaration of Independence inspiration, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Can you just picture the scene: "That spanking was positively Rousseauvian in delivery, darling!"
The famous actors Jack Nicholson and Sharon Stone like to be spanked. Okay, I'm making that up, but they seem like the type, don't they? I know that, given the opportunity, I'd spank Sharon Stone. Wouldn't you? Even my serial PI-with-a-piece-of-bullet-in-his-brain, Dick Moonlight, likes a good spanking now and then. But then when it comes to sex, he's most definitely a player.
I guess in the end, what it all comes down to is this: The world is filled with too much spanking, and not enough spanking.
Get the spankin' new Vincent Zandri release from Down & Out Books, MOONLIGHT WEEPS!
Moonlight Weeps
WWW.VINCENTZANDRI.COM
I was just about fed up with the spanking debate that's tackled NFL football, in particular Adrian Peterson of the Minnesota Vikings who, in the wake of the Ray Rice-left-hook-to-finacee's-jaw debacle, was sidelined after it was learned he spanked his four-year old with a switch. Apparently spanking with a switch was enough to cause the child some bruising, which in and of itself is a little disturbing, especially now that so many football players have come to his defense stating that they too were spanked as kids with switches. Ouch!
I was spanked as a kid. But not with a switch. I wasn't beaten or punched or tossed out the door of a moving vehicle. But I was spanked. It seemed normal at the time because I can remember doing some really stupid things like ignoring my math homework for a couple of months which I most definitely did not do a second time after my dad learned about it and spanked me as a punishment (he took away my bedroom TV too which hurt a lot more). Lesson learned. And like my grandmother used to say, If God didn't want us to spank our children, he wouldn't have given them soft little bums.
Howard Kurtz at Fox News is reporting today that Chris Cuomo of CNN confessed to spanking his little boy. In fact, Cuomo goes a step further by saying he might have gotten too physical with the child on occasion and for this he is deeply apologetic and regretful. I would imagine that Chris, having grown up in an Italian American family, albeit a politically famous one, was also spanked. I can make that assumption since I too grew up in a mostly Italian American family. Italian dads, especially when overworked, can be real hotheads, myself included. It's also interesting to note that Cuomo and I attended the same private high school, The Albany Academy, where on more than one occasion I witnessed a teacher whalloping an out-of-line student. Prior to that, I attended a Roman Catholic grade school where I saw a blue habit-wearing nun literally punch the shit out of a bad kid. I remember the kid's name was David and I also remember that he was bully who tossed his weight around. That nun had a left hook that would have made Mike Tyson proud.
Later on, as I grew into adulthood, I was surprised to find that spanking would still play an important role in my life. Only this time, it wasn't as a punishment. It became a kind of fun thing to do behind closed doors with the girlfriend. A little spanking here and there could liven things up. Some of the spanks were far harder than they were when I was being punished but somehow, they felt way better.
Spanking added some real spice to an otherwise bland, foreplay-missionary sex-grab-me-a-beer-honey-while-your-up evening. And to be further honest, we'd inevitably have a good laugh over something that hurt so good.
For anyone who doesn't believe spanking should have a place in our adult lives think again. Check out these little online tidbit:
How to spank: Sensual spanking tips and tricks
Did you know that spanking a child is illegal in Germany, but spanking your girlfriend (or she spanking you), is entirely encouraged. I'm all for outlawing spanking with a switch. It seems a barbaric practice to me. But why then does a little light spanking with a leather whip between my sig other and myself seems so enticing?
Chris Cuomo shouldn't be so hard on himself. He should learn from his mistakes and embrace the other side of spanking. Adrian Peterson might do the same. Certainly, Ray Rice needs to learn that punching your fiancee out in an elevator is an act that deserves a spanking, but not the good kind.
Cracked.com reports that even famous geniuses like TE Lawrence of Arabia liked to be spanked. So did Percy Grainger, and so did Declaration of Independence inspiration, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Can you just picture the scene: "That spanking was positively Rousseauvian in delivery, darling!"
The famous actors Jack Nicholson and Sharon Stone like to be spanked. Okay, I'm making that up, but they seem like the type, don't they? I know that, given the opportunity, I'd spank Sharon Stone. Wouldn't you? Even my serial PI-with-a-piece-of-bullet-in-his-brain, Dick Moonlight, likes a good spanking now and then. But then when it comes to sex, he's most definitely a player.
I guess in the end, what it all comes down to is this: The world is filled with too much spanking, and not enough spanking.
Get the spankin' new Vincent Zandri release from Down & Out Books, MOONLIGHT WEEPS!
Moonlight Weeps
WWW.VINCENTZANDRI.COM
What I Feared the Most
The following essay is now appearing at The Vincent Zandri Vox in slightly different form: http://vincentzandri.blogspot.com/201...
This time of year is a bit strange for me in several ways, not the least of which is the anniversary of my split with my second wife. This happened 9 years ago, almost to the day. It was a rough time for me, for her, for our infant daughter, for my two sons from my first marriage.
I was in rough shape. After having had a successful run as a freelance journalist, having earned my MFA in Writing, having nailed my first quarter million dollar contract with a big NYC publisher, all within a period of 7 or 8 years, I found myself without any kind of writing job whatsoever, my hope of nailing a second book contract a pipe dream, and now, my second marriage to a woman I loved, most definitely on the rocks.
For years I blamed the publishing system. You know, if it hadn't been for their silly consolidations my editors wouldn't have been fired and I, along with a bunch of other writers, wouldn't have been shown the door, our only hope to start all over again. If they hadn't given me that big two book contract in the first place, I wouldn't have quit freelancing as a journalist and severed ties with my bosses. The hole I had dug all by myself, for myself...somehow it was all somebody else's fault when in fact it was my fault for not seeing the writing on the wall in the first place and for storing all my golden eggs in one basket that was riddled with holes.
You see, once you've been to the big time and enjoyed the accolades and the parties and the back pats, it's pretty damned hard to pick yourself up again from out of the gutter, and start all over. All you want to do instead is run and hide. You fear everything. The phone ringing, a knock on the door, dinner with friends. You know, friends who will ask you if you are "still writing."
You fear the bills coming in. You fear the hollowness in your wallet and in your heart. You fear that look on your wife's face that says, "We're broke. Why don't you pick up some kind of work?" You fear having to get a job. A real job. You fear having to become a nobody again, and you fear having to write your way out of a hole because you worked so damned hard at it the first time around, you're not sure you have the energy to do it all over again even if you haven't yet hit forty.
Mostly what you fear is yourself.
My wife didn't want to have to ask me to leave, but she had no choice. As I stood inside my new small apartment, alone, feeling devastated, I knew I had no choice but to confront my worst fear. I sat down in front of my laptop, and I pushed all resistance aside, and I went to work writing the novel that would become Moonlight Falls. For better or for worse.
Nine years ago this week, I faced my worst fear, and it has made all the difference.
The newly released 8th Episode in the Dick Moonlight PI Noir series: MOONLIGHT WEEPS
Moonlight Weeps
Vincent Zandri
WWW.VINCENTZANDRI.COM
This time of year is a bit strange for me in several ways, not the least of which is the anniversary of my split with my second wife. This happened 9 years ago, almost to the day. It was a rough time for me, for her, for our infant daughter, for my two sons from my first marriage.
I was in rough shape. After having had a successful run as a freelance journalist, having earned my MFA in Writing, having nailed my first quarter million dollar contract with a big NYC publisher, all within a period of 7 or 8 years, I found myself without any kind of writing job whatsoever, my hope of nailing a second book contract a pipe dream, and now, my second marriage to a woman I loved, most definitely on the rocks.
For years I blamed the publishing system. You know, if it hadn't been for their silly consolidations my editors wouldn't have been fired and I, along with a bunch of other writers, wouldn't have been shown the door, our only hope to start all over again. If they hadn't given me that big two book contract in the first place, I wouldn't have quit freelancing as a journalist and severed ties with my bosses. The hole I had dug all by myself, for myself...somehow it was all somebody else's fault when in fact it was my fault for not seeing the writing on the wall in the first place and for storing all my golden eggs in one basket that was riddled with holes.
You see, once you've been to the big time and enjoyed the accolades and the parties and the back pats, it's pretty damned hard to pick yourself up again from out of the gutter, and start all over. All you want to do instead is run and hide. You fear everything. The phone ringing, a knock on the door, dinner with friends. You know, friends who will ask you if you are "still writing."
You fear the bills coming in. You fear the hollowness in your wallet and in your heart. You fear that look on your wife's face that says, "We're broke. Why don't you pick up some kind of work?" You fear having to get a job. A real job. You fear having to become a nobody again, and you fear having to write your way out of a hole because you worked so damned hard at it the first time around, you're not sure you have the energy to do it all over again even if you haven't yet hit forty.
Mostly what you fear is yourself.
My wife didn't want to have to ask me to leave, but she had no choice. As I stood inside my new small apartment, alone, feeling devastated, I knew I had no choice but to confront my worst fear. I sat down in front of my laptop, and I pushed all resistance aside, and I went to work writing the novel that would become Moonlight Falls. For better or for worse.
Nine years ago this week, I faced my worst fear, and it has made all the difference.
The newly released 8th Episode in the Dick Moonlight PI Noir series: MOONLIGHT WEEPS
Moonlight Weeps
Vincent Zandri
WWW.VINCENTZANDRI.COM
The Modern Novelist as Sage
The following essay is now appearing in slightly different form at The Vincent Zandri Vox: http://vincentzandri.blogspot.com/201...
Ferguson is burning.
Heads belonging to Western journalists are being cut off by the evil ISIS half a world away.
President Barack Hussein Obama is releasing Islamic Radical detainees from Gitmo because he feels politically obligated to do so.
Illegal aliens are pouring into the US while millions have been legalized at the stroke of a pen, not because its in the best interest of the country, but because politics rule the day.
Antisemitism is on the rise globally.
Race relations in the US have eroded and rotted over the past decade.
School shootings are so commonplace we are unaffected by them.
Overpopulation threatens the world food bank.
Ebola ravages West Africa.
Political correctness has moved in, and kicked the truth out on its ass.
Russia is on the move.
Iran will soon have the Bomb...
Zandri pens his novels and stories, and worries that the world he creates is entirely separate from a physical world that is growing and morphing faster than a weed on steroids. In a word, he retreats, looks away from the ugly picture. He is not writing anything that describes the world to itself. Years ago the novelist was considered a sage. The words he and she wrote, although fiction, bore a certain truth that were a direct reflection of the time they lived in. The novelist/philosopher did not retreat from the world then, but instead, challenged it.
Steinbeck, making sense of his world
Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath and spoke for millions of impoverished workers suffering amidst the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression.
Hemingway wrote The Sun Also Rises and a new generation of young men learned to say what they mean and mean what they say. But for the first time, men realized the power women truly have over them, and that all love must end tragically.
Later on, Mailer would write Why Are We in Vietnam?, a frantic Alaskan hunting novel that spoke as loud and powerfully as the shots that would soon be fired by the rifles on the Ohio State Campus. Mailer, the genius of metaphor.
In the 1980s we had Jay McInerny writing about the Bolivian Marching Powder in Bright Lights, Big City and suddenly, a generation strung out on Brooks Brothers, Manhattan apartments they couldn't afford, and cocaine, were now the modern romantic equivalent of Fitzgerald's Jazz Age decadence.
Zandri realizes how simplistic and even vague his examples are. In fact, he might even be lacking in a certain degree of accuracy. But the point, he feels, is transparent enough. Who are the sages of his generation? The novelists who fictionalize but who also tell the truth, or a version of the truth anyway, that puts things into some kind of order, or framework that can be better understood?
Fitz, doing what he loved even more than booze
Perhaps Zandri is doing that himself, without consciously doing it. Maybe he isn't retreating after all. Maybe in writing about a failed script writer obsessed with the blonde, blue-eyed woman who just moved in next door and who will manipulate him into killing her cop husband, he is expressing a deep-seated loneliness and isolation that isn't yet entirely realized. The loneliness is surly evident in the smartphones that occupy the two bed-stands in his master bedroom. Smartphones that, upon waking, will be the first thing touched, fondled, eyed, paid attention to, loved, lusted after ...
Add, human beings are becoming robots to the above-stated list...
Zandri is reaching for something here, but he's not quite sure what exactly. For certain, the ambiguity is evident in the writing of this essay. News Flash! Lennon comes to mind suddenly. John Lennon wrote and sang about the world so eloquently and alarmingly in his 1970 classic, Isolation. "We're afraid to be alone..."
Not to flirt with cliche here, but the world has been spinning out of control ever since the serpent sweet talked Eve and she, in turn, got Adam to eat the forbidden fruit. Our own demise is upon us. So Zandri chooses the only sensible option. He retreats into a world entirely his own, and he writes about it. He chooses isolation as the only sane option. But then, that isolation is a direct reflection of the times we live and die in. Therein lies the irony.
WWW.VINCENTZANDRI.COM
The Remains
Ferguson is burning.
Heads belonging to Western journalists are being cut off by the evil ISIS half a world away.
President Barack Hussein Obama is releasing Islamic Radical detainees from Gitmo because he feels politically obligated to do so.
Illegal aliens are pouring into the US while millions have been legalized at the stroke of a pen, not because its in the best interest of the country, but because politics rule the day.
Antisemitism is on the rise globally.
Race relations in the US have eroded and rotted over the past decade.
School shootings are so commonplace we are unaffected by them.
Overpopulation threatens the world food bank.
Ebola ravages West Africa.
Political correctness has moved in, and kicked the truth out on its ass.
Russia is on the move.
Iran will soon have the Bomb...
Zandri pens his novels and stories, and worries that the world he creates is entirely separate from a physical world that is growing and morphing faster than a weed on steroids. In a word, he retreats, looks away from the ugly picture. He is not writing anything that describes the world to itself. Years ago the novelist was considered a sage. The words he and she wrote, although fiction, bore a certain truth that were a direct reflection of the time they lived in. The novelist/philosopher did not retreat from the world then, but instead, challenged it.
Steinbeck, making sense of his world
Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath and spoke for millions of impoverished workers suffering amidst the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression.
Hemingway wrote The Sun Also Rises and a new generation of young men learned to say what they mean and mean what they say. But for the first time, men realized the power women truly have over them, and that all love must end tragically.
Later on, Mailer would write Why Are We in Vietnam?, a frantic Alaskan hunting novel that spoke as loud and powerfully as the shots that would soon be fired by the rifles on the Ohio State Campus. Mailer, the genius of metaphor.
In the 1980s we had Jay McInerny writing about the Bolivian Marching Powder in Bright Lights, Big City and suddenly, a generation strung out on Brooks Brothers, Manhattan apartments they couldn't afford, and cocaine, were now the modern romantic equivalent of Fitzgerald's Jazz Age decadence.
Zandri realizes how simplistic and even vague his examples are. In fact, he might even be lacking in a certain degree of accuracy. But the point, he feels, is transparent enough. Who are the sages of his generation? The novelists who fictionalize but who also tell the truth, or a version of the truth anyway, that puts things into some kind of order, or framework that can be better understood?
Fitz, doing what he loved even more than booze
Perhaps Zandri is doing that himself, without consciously doing it. Maybe he isn't retreating after all. Maybe in writing about a failed script writer obsessed with the blonde, blue-eyed woman who just moved in next door and who will manipulate him into killing her cop husband, he is expressing a deep-seated loneliness and isolation that isn't yet entirely realized. The loneliness is surly evident in the smartphones that occupy the two bed-stands in his master bedroom. Smartphones that, upon waking, will be the first thing touched, fondled, eyed, paid attention to, loved, lusted after ...
Add, human beings are becoming robots to the above-stated list...
Zandri is reaching for something here, but he's not quite sure what exactly. For certain, the ambiguity is evident in the writing of this essay. News Flash! Lennon comes to mind suddenly. John Lennon wrote and sang about the world so eloquently and alarmingly in his 1970 classic, Isolation. "We're afraid to be alone..."
Not to flirt with cliche here, but the world has been spinning out of control ever since the serpent sweet talked Eve and she, in turn, got Adam to eat the forbidden fruit. Our own demise is upon us. So Zandri chooses the only sensible option. He retreats into a world entirely his own, and he writes about it. He chooses isolation as the only sane option. But then, that isolation is a direct reflection of the times we live and die in. Therein lies the irony.
WWW.VINCENTZANDRI.COM
The Remains
