Knife Play, DMT, and The Trail of Dead

SEX - KNIFE PLAY

Happy Day After Halloween, perverts! It's Scorpio season, the spookiest time of year. I love my dark side, and not just as an excuse to ignore cell phone bills in order to pay for a brand new Día de los Muertos skull tattoo, or to make me feel better about my unfortunate sexual decisions in college. The trick is to embrace your darkness rather than try and snuff it, or else it might bubble up and you'll find yourself etching the word "ALONE" into your thigh with a kitchen knife at 3AM after too much absinthe.

Let's talk about using knives during sex. A small droplet of the broad BDSM spectrum; knife play is when knives are used to enhance a sexual experience, whether blood is actually drawn or not. It's classified as edgeplay, for it's high-potential for bodily harm and general kinkiness. Knife play was infamously brought to public attention by Angelina Jolie, as my editor Kelly once detailed in Kelly's Krush Korner. Knife play can be as vanilla as my boyfriend slicing away the crotchless fishnet bodysuit I wore as part of my Cher costume, or as Angie-extreme as cutting your partner's arm because boring ol' P in V isn't stimulating enough for you.

If you are in a trusting BDSM-friendly relationship looking to add gentle knife play, here are a few ideas. I'm leaving anything out that involves actually drawing blood because I don't want some psycho-nincompoop slicing their girlfriend's throat then telling the press they got the idea from me.

• With your partner tied up and blindfolded, gently trail a knife up their body while whispering all the threatening things you'll do if they don't act like a good little slave. 
• Pour hot wax on your partner then use a knife to scrape it off. 
• Use a knife to tear off panties.
• Use knives to cut away rope you've bound your partner with.
• Just hold up a damn knife while barking out obscene sexual orders. With most BDSM play, it's the psychological element that's the biggest turn on, rather than a physical sensation itself.

Obviously, there is a HUGE warning label on all of this; you could cut your partner and actually do some harm, or if you're playing outside of a fluid-bonded relationship the possible blood explosure increases the risk of disease transmission. Just don't be an idiot and kill anyone.

DRUGS - DMT 

I love when a drug exists in nature, because it's like, "Mother Earth or God or whoever put this here for a reason, we're SUPPOSED to try it!" DMT, Dimethyltryptamine, is a naturally-occurring trace amine neurotransmitter found in plants and humans. Combined with MAOIs (monoamine oxidase inhibitors) DMT is the main psychoactive in ayahuasca, the Amazonian psychedelic known for its visually intense and life-altering trips. Back here in the concrete jungle, DMT is commonly made into a pink-crystalline powder and smoked, with highs lasting only 30-minutes or so, nothing compared to the days spent with spirit animals and aliens in other realms you get with ayahuasca. Interestingly, nothing would happen if you ate the first-world crystal version, it took the ancient wisdom of the Amazonian shamans to realize DMT is only effective ingested when combined with a MAOI.

A warning, if you're going to try DMT the ayahuasca route, be careful if you are currently taking SSRIs, as there are potentially fatal effects when mixed with MAOIs. On the topic of depression, I've had friends living in the depths of an emotional hell who have taken ayahuasca and had it completely pull them out of the darkness, exorcising the need for anti-depressants.

It has been proposed by scientists that at the edge of death, the human brain releases large amounts of DMT, which could explain the ethereal near-death experiences reported by those who came back from the light. This subject was controversially challenged, and subsequently debated in a recent Newsweek article titled "Heaven is Real."

I've never personally tried DMT, but ayahuasca is on the top of my drugs-to-do list. I'd love to experience it in the jungle with the guidance of a shaman rather than wait until the pineal gland DMT explosion on my death bed.

ROCK 'N' ROLL - …AND YOU WILL KNOW US BY THE TRAIL OF DEAD

When I first heard about Trail of Dead I thought, wow, that sounds like some Michael Myer-level scary ass shit. No disrespect; but their name is sort of like a porn site categorizing a MMF threesome as a gang-bang, they're slightly over-labeling the depths of the depravity. Once I got to know their music I realized it's actually more Fox Mulder than Michael Myer, as it's very spooky and cynical of the government, but also more sexy than psychotic.

…And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead released their eighth studio album, Lost Songs on October 22. It's a brew of post-hardcore and alternative rock, a little too intense for an ayahuasca trip, but not quite scary enough for knife play. According to their Facebook page, "the album is inspired by the Syrian civil war, and dedicated to Russian punk-rock activists Pussy Riot." The group was formed by Jason Reece and Conrad Keely who seem to be really good at sharing, the two switch between vocals, drumming, and guitars. Live, apparently these dudes like to end with a bang and smash a bunch of shit, so I'll probably catch them at Irving Plaza on November 16 to try and see some of that action.

You can stream "Catatonic" below, a ruthlessly charged highlight of the album.

@TheBowieCat