#tickle caption

If we define an artist as someone who starts from the mundane and acts upon it to render it beautiful, than a good torturer is an artist. Here we have the feet of some unimportant, forgettable individual, otherwise used for the ordinary act of walking. But under a torturer's attention, suffering can be extracted from their nerve endings as raw material for aesthiticization. After all, as even the most novice student of art criticism will tell you, suffering is the prima materia for art.

With the timing and digital dexterity of a musician, the command of words and taunts of a poet, the psychological insight if the playwright, and the eye of a painter, a good torturer can impose rhythm and order and cadence on a torture session. The victim becomes instrument for a finely orchestrated, multi-sensorial event of mixed media. Here is born the intoxicating mixture of divine and vulgar, sadism and masochism, Dionysian and Apollonian that the highest art aspires to.

Although often reluctant, the victim ought to be proud of their part in the artist's world. Seemingly without utility, art is in fact the pinnacle of human endeavor. The fruit of all other utilities. And for the brief (or long) moment that the victim of torture is being made to produce it, they are a part of transcendence.

One of the things I absolutely hated while living with my wife and her boyfriend were the "Feet Inspection Days." It's probably self-explanable by the name, but the reasoning for it is that one of the stipulations for him living at my house was that I had to keep my feet up to a certain standard: Free of dirt, nails trimmed and clear coated, soles scrubbed, exfoliated, and moisturized, and on special days (Christmas, my birthday, the Superbowl) lightly oiled and sometimes with festive nail polish if asked. For a grown man none of that is particularly hard. Even on days where my feet had to be oiled I could avoid dirt pretty easily by just crawling. So you might be wondering, why the feet inspection days?

Well, part of the little plastic binder of rules I had to follow was that I was supposed to surrender my feet for periodic inspection to ensure compliance with the conditions I mentioned above. It was also stipulated that these inspections would occur on a roughly bi-weekly basis and would just involve a quick check to ensure my feet were clean and pedicured and the adjudication of punishment in the event that they were not. This already was more frequent than necessary, as I think I did a fairly good job keeping my feet up to code. But since it was in the rules binder, it meant we had to go through it anyway. But that doesn't sound so bad, right? Except the problem is that my wife's boyfriend kept adding his own little add-ons that weren't in the binder and then telling me he was allowed to make changes whenever he wanted.

The first change he made was insisting I be bound for the inspection. Nowhere in the rules did it say I had to be bound for the foot inspection, but I accidentally squirmed one time, ONE FREAKING TIME, and he told me that going forward, my entire body had to be surrendered and restrained instead of just my feet. This also had the effect of stretching it out into a bigger affair involving tying me up when it was supposed to be just a quick spot check.

Another irritating change he made was to just do the inspections whenever he wanted. What was supposed to be every two weeks became once a week, sometimes two, sometimes three, who the hell knows!? There was no consistency to it, so it wasn't uncommon that I would be dressed up and ready to go out and see some old friends who happened to be in town only for him to announce an impromptu inspection and make me hand over my socks and shoes and go down to the basement for binding.

But that was just the beginning.

He also would add a bunch of extra requirements that weren't in the binder of rules. Nowhere did it say that my soles had to be scrubbed pink, but he refused to believe me when I told him to look in the book and would instead gaslight me by telling me I wasn't remembering correctly and that I need to reread it. And on top of that, do you notice anything about the picture of me above? Yeah, MY SOLES WERE ALREADY PINK! He'd given me a foot spanking for some reason or another earlier that day, so they were plenty pink, but apparently they "weren't pink enough" and he had to correct that.

But the WORST part of inspection day (well, aside from him sometimes not untying me afterwards), was that I wasn't allowed to correct him on any of his little rule changes. Any attempt I made to get him to follow the rules HE HIMSELF WROTE was met by accusing me of "backtalking," "childishness," and "disrespecting him." Oh and guess what, those were apparently "different infractions," so if he felt like it, he could (and did) assign me a certain amount of time locked up in the basement for each of those.

If I protested that any of that was unfair, my punishments would be doubled. If I didn't thank him for correcting me and apologize on the spot, they were doubled. If he thought I was "insincere" I would have to do that part again and, you guessed it, punishment doubled. That was how I ended up blowing through five years of accumulated vacation leave. I'd argued that my punishment (a week in the basement with a buddy of his coming over to administer tickling for a few hours every day) was unfair and then I forgot to thank him for correcting me. That earned me nearly a month down there.

But, I'm sorry, does this look like a "foot inspection" to you?