New stuff

I've been trying to dress more like a grown up lately. I mean, I'm in school to be a movie producer. How am I going to fly all over the globe to meet with investors if I don't look like someone who can be trusted with a couple million dollars?

I've gotten rid of my sneakers. I now have two pairs of very sharp looking leather shoes, one black one brown. I also have five amazing looking collared shirts and a waistcoat. Nearly everything came from Uniqlo.

Here is the big one though: I bought a tie. I don't know how to tie it yet, but that can come later. With everything on, I look like I stepped off the cover of Vogue. I want to get used to dressing this way during my last year of school so that I can actually feel like it's no big deal when I graduate and dress this way all the time.

Another big change that's taken place since the last time I posted is that my girlfriend and I moved into a huge fucking apartment, which we've been filling with things from Ikea. All of this is due to the fact that I have been working overtime and making more money than I have ever had.

However: my new-found financial freedom has also allowed me to indulge my more immature side more than ever. The absolute highlight of my summer was seeing Walking with Dinosaurs: The Arena Spectacular at Madison Square Garden. My girlfriend and I were screaming along with a stadium full of five-year-olds as each new dinosaur appeared. They were incredible. I was completely freaking out the entire time.

I'm slowly filling the holes in my comic collection too. There is this publisher I can't get enough of called Eclipse. In the mid-eighties, they put out some of the greatest comic series of all time, including Zot!, Airboy, and Mr. Monster. Not only do these books feature better writing and art than nearly any mainstream comics before or since, but they are also printed on better quality paper with a laser scanned color process which reproduces the painterly work of the colorist. The mechanically separated processes which came before and the tacky digital techniques which have been invented since are wholly inferior.

Now, you'd probably imagine that Eclipse comics are really expensive, right? Wrong! They are cheap and they are everywhere. Look in any back issue bin of 80s small press stuff and you will find them for next to nothing. I've got tons of singles, but what I'd really been wanting for forever are the lavish and long out-of-print hardcover editions which Eclipse collected some of these series into. Now I've finally got them! :D

Last of all, I finally ordered myself a 24 pack of Bambino Biancos. For those of you who may not know, Bambino is the Cadillac of diapers ... and they only come in adult sizes. That's because they are the first designer diaper, made for and by diaper lovers. For the adult baby crowd, they offer a couple of options in childish prints, but I will stick to the all-white "bianco" style until they come up with some designs featuring space stuff, superheroes, or dinosaurs.

For a long time, I had been wearing Pull-Ups GoodNites, which are a lot of fun and more absorbent than people generally give them credit for. Unfortunately, the largest GoodNites are designed with pre-teen bedwetters in mind, and as such they are meant to be wet gradually over the course of the night. They are fine for recreational daytime wear, as long as you wet them a little at a time whenever you start to feel the need to go, but they can't really take a full bladder release all at once. You also have to be careful how full you let them get, as they have a tendency to overflow when you sit down.

For all their downsides though, GoodNites are nice because they are cute, trim, and readily available. There are 5-7 million kids in America who wet the bed, and as such, you would be hard pressed to find a drug or grocery store that doesn't stock them. When it comes to adult sizes though, a good diaper is much harder to find. This is pretty weird, considering that about 25 million people nationwide deal with some form of incontinence ... and that doesn't even count the recreational diaper-wearers out there who supplement that market.

In any case, the diapers you can get from your local drugstore which are actually intended for adults aren't much better in the absorbency department than GoodNites. Also, they look stupid as hell. Depends, easily the most recognizable name brand in the field, are notoriously bad, unless you get the "fitted Maximum Protection" version. These still have crappy tapes, but they at least provide sufficient absorbency to do their intended job.

The "fitted Maximum Protection" Depends aren't easy to find though. Most major chain stores seem to prefer to stock the more middle of the road ones, which in my experience are some of the flimsiest diapers ever.

So the question you are probably asking yourself now is, "if so many people in America wear diapers, why the hell aren't there better ones at my local drug store?" Well, as Justin Peters put it in his article for Slate magazine, "Like chocolate, beer, and jewel thieves, the best adult diapers come from Europe. This is not coincidental. European manufacturers don't have to cater to institutional purchasers' demands, so they're more likely to sell on quality rather than cost."

That's right. Because 50% of all people in nursing homes are incontinent, large institutional buyers make up a major part of the sales for products like Depends. The booming medical industry here in the United States knows that people who can't take care of themselves aren't in a position to complain about the inadequacies of cut-rate diapers. Keep in mind that Kimberly-Clark, the company which makes flimsy adult incontinence products like Depends and Poise, is the same one which makes better products like Huggies, Pull-Ups, and GoodNites for kids. This is because parents generally have a stronger interest in their children's well-being than professional caretakers, and are therefore more likely to purchase diapers based on quality rather than cost.

So what if Bambino products suddenly appeared on store shelves across the nation? My guess is that anyone who wears diapers on a regular basis and had a choice in the matter would switch over without a second thought. Think of the comics I mentioned above. If everyone had known about Eclipse when those comics were just coming out, they would still be around and probably be bigger than Marvel is right now.

Another bonus to having a company like Bambino at the head of the diaper industry would be the fact that they are so in touch with the recreational diaper-wearing community. Kimberly-Clark does so much to promote the statistics about how common bladder control problems are. Imagine if Bambino was out there, as visible as them, saying "Yes! It is totally okay to want to wear diapers, whether your bladder control is good or not. You are not alone." I know it would have done a lot to ease my mind as a kid.

As soon as people realize that there are alternatives to the vastly inferior, mass produced garbage that big companies force upon us, the world will be a better place. That's one of the reasons I want to produce movies. We need people out there with good sense and taste, and it's worth applying these attributes to selecting a necktie if it means I will have an opportunity to use them in bringing new films to life with previously unknown creative talent. After all, I can always go home to an apartment filled with toys, games, and other un-grown-up things.

* * *

"Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms.

"Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up."

-- C.S. Lewis

Out and About

So much has happened since I last wrote! First of all, I finished my short film for the semester. Absolutely everything that could have gone wrong did, but it got finished. In other school news: I wet my pants in class.

It was in my finance and distribution class. A guy from Severn video had come in to talk about how he discovered this movie called Birdemic: Shock and Terror. It was made by a nutty Korean computer programmer who had trademarked the phrase “Master of the Romantic Thriller” for himself. After becoming obsessed with Alfred Hitchcock, he decided that he wanted to do an environmentally conscious update of The Birds. The birds in the movie were designed by a college student who flaked out at the last minute and didn't finish animating the models. The result is that the avian aggressors just kind of hang in the air and flap their wings mechanically. It is a bizarre thing to see.

After failing to get accepted to Sundance, the director decided to drive to the festival anyway and parade up and down the street in a van covered with fake birds and a loudspeaker rigged to emit eagle screeches. The guy from Severn video investigated, and to his great surprise he found what he described to us as the funniest movie he had ever seen.

He showed us a series of clips. I'm not sure what the funniest movie I've seen is, but Birdemic was enough that maintaining bladder control proved impossible. I held on as much as I could, but I couldn't stop laughing and the clips just kept coming. With each one, I wet myself a little more. Despite my best efforts, my bladder was completely empty in minutes.

Nobody noticed of course. I've had way too much experience hiding this kind of accident, especially at school. I kept seated until we were dismissed, and rushed out of class while everyone else was distracted with packing up their things. Before I left though, the guest speaker announce that Birdemic would be making its New York Premier in a couple of weeks at the IFC Center. As much as I wanted to see it, I knew that I would probably run into my teacher and classmates there. If I had wet this badly just watching a few clips, there was no way I was going to be able to stay dry though the whole movie. If I was going to go, I was going to have to wear a diaper.

It's still a little humiliating every time I realize that there are still times when I do actually need diapers. The embarrassment and lack of control associated with them is definitely one of the things that turns me on, but sometimes I wish my episodes of incontinence had an on/off switch that I could leave off unless I was safely at home and wearing adequate protection.

The freedom of knowing I could go to the movie and laugh as hard as I wanted without having to worry about maintaining control was awesome though. There were so many times when I was younger when I knew for sure that I was going into a situation where I was going to need a diaper and couldn't wear one. I always kind of dreaded watching any comedy with my friends, because I knew that the more I was enjoying the movie, the less chance I was going to have of escaping without an accident. Whenever I was having the best time, that's when I had to worry most about humiliating myself in front of my friends.

This time though, I was going with my girlfriend who understood about my wetting issues and knew that I would need to be diapered. It was so liberating to just accept that I needed protection and to know that I was with someone who wasn't going to make fun of me for it.

It was certainly a good thing that I wore protection. I haven't wet myself so much in a movie since I saw Jim Carrey in The Mask at the age of eight. That's saying something, too; my uncle who took me to that one still tells stories about how I was upside down in my seat with change falling out of my pockets.

I actually wet so much during Birdemic that I leaked. When I stood up, there were two little crescent shaped wet spots under my bottom. I was only wearing a GoodNites Pull-Up though. Next time I'm in a situation like this I'll know to wear something more heavy-duty.

As we were waiting in the subway for the train home, my girlfriend turned to me and asked “Did you use it?”

We had been taking about the movie until then, so I wasn't exactly sure what she meant. “Use what?” I asked.

She replied by reaching around and giving my diapered bottom a squeeze, right where I knew I had leaked. I gave a little “meep” of surprise and blushed.

“Um ... yeah ... I'm totally soaked. I think I leaked a little.”

She hugged me gave a sympathetic little “aww.”

“It's okay,” she whispered into my ear.

“You realize though,” I whispered back, “that you just gave me a diaper check in public?”

Both of us kind of broke down into embarrassed giggles at that point. It was good to know that I was going to get hugged and and laugh with her about it together with her rather than get laughed at or scolded.

That would be the end of the story, but last night I was out eating Japanese food with a friend who used to be a professional dom and phone sex operator. It kind of goes without saying that she is a person who is very understanding about fetish stuff.

She just got out of a bad relationship, so we were talking about relationship stuff. It came up how important mutual respect and open-mindedness are in sex. I had thought about opening up to her about my diaper fetish before, but the subject had always changed or we got interrupted. This time it didn't, and before I knew it, I was telling her all about my history of wetting myself and wanting to wear diapers.

She didn't even bat an eye, and was even interested to know more. She had dealt with some adult baby clients in her phone sex days, but never someone who just liked diapers. Afterward, we met up with my girlfriend and went bowling at 1:30 AM. I won, which never happens, and then we went out for a chocolate malt. It was a good night, and it occurs to me now how really excellent it was when I consider the fact that I was in the company of two friends who both knew all about my most embarrassing secret and still wanted to hang out with me.