from the sprigs* archives: spanking machine
July 20, 2008
*Sprigs was my first blog, which most of you never laid eyes on. The entry is from Oct. 31, 2005.
We all know them. They drive on our roads and work in our offices. They are in the grocery store, in public parks, at the library, in our classrooms and online. They are the people we encounter on a daily basis who deserve to be put in the spanking machine.
What is the spanking machine, you ask? It’s a fair question. I first learned about the spanking machine in college, when one of my friends was writing a final paper in which she compared Darwin’s Origin of the Species with Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry. I don’t remember the specifics of her comparison, except that it sucked: She wrote the paper without reading a single page of Origin of the Species. (I just didn’t have time to read it, she told me. She had all semester, I should add.) Then, when she received a “D” on the paper, she had her mother call the professor to complain about the unfair grade her daughter had gotten.
The professor was outraged. She immediately called for my friend to be “put in a spanking machine.” It is a concept that I have carried with me since that day, and it’s gotten me through some tough times. Whenever I see someone behaving badly, I think of the spanking machine and imagine that person in it. I envision it as a device that floats somewhere off in the ether. It’s sort of like Kansas in The Wizard of Oz; you just close your eyes and wish someone there, and poof, they materialize inside the machine.
They are strapped in of course. You wouldn’t want them to fall out and sustain any injuries other than the spanking. After all, they haven’t committed a crime for which they should be punished under the law. They’ve just cut you off on your way to work or double dipped their chips in the communal vat of salsa. Or maybe they’ve done something more subtle, such as interrupt your story so many times you forgot what the hell point you were trying to make. Or even subtler still — perhaps they’ve looked at you askance as you passed by or they’ve screwed up their face in judgment when you told them a story about your pet hamster.
Whatever it is that got them there, they deserve it. These people simply can’t keep getting away with these sorts of things with impunity. So, strapped in the machine, they receive their punishment. The whole process is automated, enabling you to get back to what you were saying, eating or doing when the infraction occurred. The appropriate number of spanks is delivered, and the machine chooses a spanking level that fits the situation: anything from a light pat to a full-on paddling.
After they are plopped from the machine back into the real world, you can be assured these folks, with their newly chaffed rear ends, won’t be bothering you again. At least not any time soon. I speak from experience. I was paddled once in grade school for pulling a boy’s chair out from under him. I didn’t reveal to the principal that I was only trying to pull the boy’s chair closer to me because I loved him and I wanted him close by. I didn’t wish him any injury at all. But that paddling was a message sent loud and cracklingly clear: Do not love boys, and if you do, don’t pull them close to you, the wood of the paddle told me in its rhythmic staccato.
No, those pesky Spankables won’t be bothering you anymore. Not if you put them in the spanking machine.
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This work is licensed under Creative Commons.
If you don’t credit Dana (by using her full name and preferably by linking back to the appropriate post) for however you copy, distribute, transmit or adapt her words, you are being bad. And naughty. And she will have her servant monkeys hunt you down and cut your hands off so you can never copy, distribute, transmit or adapt anyone’s work again and call it your own.
(Unless, of course, you were to use your butt cheeks to manipulate your keyboard with the copying, distributing, transmitting, adapting and whatnot, but Dana fortunately has only met one person whose butt cheeks are that talented. He could play a major third on a piano using nothing but his ass. She kids you not.).
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1) Of course, there are always the people who are into that sort of thing and would love to be put in the spanking machine again
and 2) what a sad conclusion! Of course, children don’t always come to the conclusion that we expect them to (adults either, for that matter)
This brings back good memories.
(No, not of seeing someone in the spanking machine, or being in one myself, but of when I first read sprigs and decided you were cooler than the average bear.)