In 1992 i was in a musical at the Montreal Fringe Festival. It was based on a story i had written, a "dance-western", starring Janet Oxley, a dancer and singer--
After the last performance, having just been to a bar and drunk a beer, I was walking home , still in my cowboy outfit, and had my fake gun in my purse ...
Up ahead, I happened to see Leonard Cohen approaching in the company of a dark-haired woman about his own age, which at the time was 58 -- and at the corner, where our paths crossed, we stopped to talk -- 
As I was still a bit drunk, I blurted out that I'd been in a play all week. To prove it, I reached into my purse and pulled out the gun I had fired once in the play.
"See, i have a gun now, too, Leonard" -- a reference to the fact that he had been teaching his kids to shoot** in the shared courtyard between our houses on St Dominique Street. (**this had led to a stray bullet passing through my 85-year-old upstairs neighbour's back window, which Leonard had graciously paid to have repaired)
Although it was not the friendliest thing to say, I said it with a smile and he looked frightened, then annoyed, then introduced me to the woman he was with: Nancy Southam -- heiress to the Southam newspaper empire.
This was a strange coincidence and snapped me back to sobriety. I said, "Oh, hi. I sometimes work for your family.." In fact I had once been a proofreader at one of their papers, and now was a freelance writer for another Southam paper, the Gazette. We exchanged pleasantries, and the two of them walked on down the street while i continued on my way home, with my toy gun in my purse, enjoying the irony.
It was not too much later that i began having a few little problems, originating with management, at the Gazette and my editor - who wanted to promote me to a permanent weekly column -- confided that he was getting flack from upstairs, apparently someone up there didn't like me -- and this surprised me as i had no enemies and barely even knew who was "upstairs" -- they were not people I would really want to know -- and eventually things blew up when i wrote an honest, fairly negative review of Robertson Davies' last novel, THE CUNNING MAN, (which I dare anyone to try and read without falling into a coma) -- 
This minor faux pas led to a full-scale public shaming. A letter from the publisher accused me of being a 'Marxist' -- because in my review I had used the phrase "Canadian ruling class" -- apparently Canada has no ruling class, and never did, and to suggest it does is proof that one is a communist. My review also made mention of 'secret societies' but that went unmentioned at the time, as they are unmentionable.
After that debacle I was no longer a Gazette freelancer. I thought "good riddance, those people are evil anyway" - little did i know how correct I was. It felt good to be moving on into the great Unknown --
That, in a way, was the first step of my life as a pony...
So I started writing pieces for other papers and publications, but with the new freelance contracts that were coming out, it became harder to eke out a living --
in early 1996 i join the freelancers' class action lawsuit against the gazette and southam -- which i believe was for $30 million in damages for stolen electronic rights --
late in 1996 i wrote a 'christmas story' for the montreal mirror (entertainment weekly) and it appeared for christmas. it featured conrad black and barbara amiel, their names only slightly changed (to "comrade back" and "barbara amiable") -- and they were getting ready to go to a Christmas ball at Buckingham Palace, where the Queen awaited them, and i made it very clear this was an Illuminati ball and that it was for only the wealthiest and blackest of perverts, and i even mentioned their hobbies, like bestiality and sodomy etc -- and this story got printed -- this was years before EYES WIDE SHUT was released and at the time i thought it was funny, and so did my friends at the Montreal Mirror.
meanwhile conrad black had just bought out Southam Inc and was taking over the newspaper industry in canada, throwing hundreds of journalists out of work and into poverty from coast to coast, so i was expressing the feelings of a lot of people in writing this story -- which sealed my fate as a pony
What do I mean by "pony"? I'll be getting to that...
so. three years later, it's the dawn of the milennium and i am blacklisted from one end of the country to the other, nobody returns my emails, nobody will even read, let alone publish, anything i write and i am squeezing out a living by giving writing workshops -- it extends to every area of my former professional life -- and now and then i hear rumours about myself, that i am "suicidal" and "schizophrenic" although i am anything but -- in certain ways, i'm actually quite happy (thats another story) living quietly in the east end of montreal, seeing almost no one but my neighbour jack -- i have lost all my former friends and contacts in the world of writing and publishing, and i have somehow also been mysteriously banned from the canada council readings program -- a certain gang seems to have engineered this -- but although broke most of the time, i'm still strangely hopeful and spiritually i'm in a good place -- i feel i have left one world for another one, where i will be able to live more authentically, once i find a new way to make a living
not that i'm looking at child pornography, it's all adult stuff -- but it's triggering those memories from my childhood -- which i am semi-conscious of in january 2000 as i'm exploring, just for that weekend,
i don't yet connect my childhood torture memories to MKULTRA -- i wouldnt learn about MKULTRA until the winter of 2002-3 -- at the time of this exploration, i think of these memories as some sort of vivid fantasy from my early childhood, unconnected to anything else in my life, which was normal on the surface. so as i surf i'm being drawn in particular to BDSM sites -- bondage, domination, sado-masochism -- and i'm not sure why, maybe because the german boyfriend had recently brought it up -- it's an unfamiliar world to me and one i have never felt the slightest interest in but probably for deeper, more personal reasons it suddenly starts to rope me in --
i've seen enough, and it's late at night, and i've had enough of exploring this depraved world -- i'm about to shut down my computer when i happen across a website owned by a man called Hans -- and i start reading what he has to say about bondage, domination, and sado-masochism, and looking at images, and at 2 am i find myself writing him an email. -- it's as if i already know him, and he is going to help me figure out my life
it doesn't take long before i get a response -- a very friendly one at that -- he's not so scary after all, in fact he's delighted to hear from me and we email back and forth and i get that unusual twinge that comes with feeling weirdly attracted to a total stranger -- it turns out he is an aries, our birthdays are a day or two apart, although he's a couple of years (i think) younger, and he has had a very intense life, having been at one point a "commando" -- among other jobs he has done for the Israeli military involving electronics and computers -- and now in his late forties he's settled down to being a bondage master and online trainer of human sex slaves, based in the Netherlands where he is married to a woman who is the daughter of nazis -- and he shows me photos of their apartment and ultra-modern living room with a huge red leather couch, where they practice their life-style -- his wife is a submissive slave and there seems to be a lot of whipping on weekends-- 
ABSOLUTELY NONE OF THIS APPEALS TO ME, it's completely sick and over the top as far as i'm concerned, in fact it's repulsive and i would never even consider living in such decadence -- and he admits it's often stressful, for both of them to keep up the excitement and not get bogged down in the petty routines and pressures of family and earning a living...
Hans believes that humans need to be enslaved, that the strong should trample the weak, that this is where the world is now heading and he's all for a society of masters and slaves -- I absolutely don't believe a single word of that garbage and i tell him so -- while he taunts me that one day i will wake up and surrender to my deep emotional need to be controlled and dominated --,
no, none of this is for me, but in the midst of my total rejection of hans' values and beliefs, which we debate back and forth for about a week, getting nowhere -- one thing he says hits the target and makes me pause for a moment: he says i suffer from a "subconscious addiction to power" and implies this controls my life in negative ways because i'm in denial of it.
this is hard to dismiss or shake off, because he has dragged my 'subconscious' into it -- and it strikes me as a kind of poetic bomb, encircling a hard kernel of truth that i can't quite wrap my mind around, but part of me can secretly embrace it...
As far as being thrilled by images of women in bondage, i think my horrified fascination was mitigated by the experience of corresponding with Hans, who seemed to take a deep interest in me as a person... 
from then on, there was this strange sense of a collar snapping shut around my neck, and of there being a subtle chain, or current of energy linking me to him. this chain is emanating from my throat chakra, where I experience a real blockage -- in real life my writing career has been taken from me by unseen enemies, of both sexes, and I can no longer express myself freely -- i'm a slave to a certain gang or cabal that controls my world
but now hans is holding the leash which attached to the collar that is choking me -- exactly how or why, i don't know -- but i feel that i can tell him the truth of what i have been going through, these past several years, with the southams and the gazette and the sense I have of being locked inside a prison that keeps getting darker and more constricted-- i can't put these feelings into words, but our emails keep going back and forth and it quickly gets boring arguing from opposite sides of the political spectrum -- so in the second week when he brags that he can train and condition any woman to become a slave, i decide i will prove him wrong, and i enroll in his online training program for human pony slaves -- for which i pay 40 euros, with my credit card -- my first online purchase ever -- entitling me to my first month of daily lessons intended to turn me into a submissive human pony slave, a process that could take a while -- but in my case, hans is optimistic because, after our intensive chat, and having administered a test in which i am asked to choose images which appeal to me, images which define the kind of slave i truly want to be, he is convinced that i have a deep latent aptitude for slavery -- and my choice of "human pony" is just perfect, in his opinion, and shows that i am well on my way to becoming the submissive i was always meant to be.
and then, to encourage me further, he sends me some private photos he took the previous summer, of a german woman he had trained as a "deep sub" -- in the photos she appeared, naked, with a bit in her mouth, chained to a cart which she was pulling -- and most thrillingly, to me at the time, there was a large metal ring through her clitoris, visible in one photo where she is pawing at the air and (presumably) whinnying in ecstasy.-- completely at one with her deep pony slave persona.
i don't know why, but those photos broke down the last of my resistance, and although i never asked for details about her, i considered her a kind of model - perhaps of what i should try to be careful not to become...
in june Hans informed me that he had found a situation where I could continue my pony training in the real world.
i would soon be invited to a party at the house of a couple in a wealthy part of town who were very interested in meeting me...
of course their names had to remain confidential, but Hans assured me they were not anyone I knew
in setting me up with this couple, he said, i would be leaving my world of fantasy and putting myself on the path to my true destiny, which was to be a sex slave.
- in my mind at the time, this was all an exotic joke -- something that i thought would make a good pornographic novel that i might even sell to keep myself afloat so i could write the holocaust novel i was really working on –
no date had yet been set for this party, except that it would be sometime in july. an email from Hans would arrive with the date – in the meantime. I needed to collect certain accessories in a small box: a silk scarf, nipple clamps and a wooden dildo which Hans instructed me to make from a piece of doweling from the hardware store. Also, two small glass bottles filled with walnut and almond oil.
And then I should wait to hear from him
when the day came there would be a phone call and a taxi would arrive at my door -- i would not be told the address but the driver would know it.
i was dying to know who the couple were, so out of curiosity i pretended to be interested.
i told a friend about the mysterious invitation and she said "don't even think about it -- you won't come out of there alive."
although that idea had already occurred to me, hearing her say it had more of an impact than just me thinking it.
****
I began wondering how I would wriggle out of this invitation, but I couldn’t see a way to do it without abruptly ending my relationship with Hans, who knew my street address. if they were serious, they could have someone wait outside and kidnap me anytime. Not that they would -- but
I pondered ways of attending the party safely – e.g. by borrowing a cellphone, alerting friends, leaving instructions to call the police if I went missing – while letting the host couple know that I had done all this in advance of coming to their house –
It was the apparent deepening plot that now enthralled me – or maybe it was the slave conditioning that caused me to hesitate, and paw the ground in indecision. or was i just reluctant to admit I had wasted the last four months involved in something really stupid?
*****
since enrolling in his online school for aspiring submissives (there was a separate site and entrance for Doms for which the slaves were denied the password), I had learned a lot about bondage, domination, and sado-masochism. from the sub’s s point of view.It was mainly about focusing all your attention on your Master: a daunting devotional task at which a human could only fail. Failure to focus, and be a perfect sub, led to punishment – a never-ending cycle of striving to please and falling short. It was heaven and hell in a harness but it appeared to make life exciting for those with the stamina to endure the extreme emotions that went with the highs and lows of total power exchange. Maybe I was jaded but i wasn’t really interested in fetishes like whips and leather, only the emotions attached, and also the intense but disembodied sex that I had experienced during the initial shock of encountering Hans.
in real life we had little in common. The less we knew about each other, the better for our online Master-slave dynamic, because in certain ways I was just stringing Hans along, pretending to be an eager pony when in fact I was mostly taking advantage of his diet and exercise program: lots of raw vegetables and fruits, a 2 km run every morning, a daily regime of masturbation. i was still living alone, exchanging daily texts with him as he deployed the gamut of behaviour modification techniques to get me to surrender and obey him in my daily life: breaking me in, he called it, leading me by the nose, keeping me subdued and corralled, extracting compliance. I rarely resisted seeing as I felt that would defeat the whole purpose. Also resistance quickly led to punishment, usually psychological. for insubordination, once, he made me stay up all night, emailing him every hour. For one whole week, I was not allowed to wear clothes in my apartment, or walk upright, and had to eat my meals from a bowl on the floor. I could have faked it of course, but I needed to explore the feelings. So I could write about them, later, when all this was over.
Meanwhile Hans was conditioning me, using phrases like “accept my fate” and “learn to settle” for life as a pony. I did feel more relaxed and less anxious at the thought of just existing like a household pet. Some of my nervous energy dissipated and as I relaxed, I also felt more compassionate, more willing to let go of my point of view. Every so often, I got little glimpses of “subspace” – the mythic realm where ponies drift when they’re feeling totally at one with their slavery. 
I didn’t feel more dependent, or moody but I had more energy due to being forced to focus on sex, which I wasn’t getting except in fantasy, but then, sex is mainly in the mind. It was the forcing, the discipline, that added a whole new level of enjoyment. There was the pain of crouching naked in the morning by my bed on curled toes, to recite the pony prayer which begins:
1. I am a slave, I am nothing, but only what my owner wants
me to be. Above all else my primary focus shall be to please
my owner, hoping that he finds me pleasing in all that I do,
whether I am in his presence or not.
I was doing the exercises, adopting the abnormal mindset, and saving all our chats in a special file -- which i was going to use when it came time to write my book exposing the international human trafficking network that preyed on women like me, and others, who fell into the trap of internet porn.
******
Early on i had guessed Hans was involved in slave trafficking. Back in February, while I was still aglow from our first chat, I dreamed I got on a plane and flew to Paris, where he met me at the airport, walked me to his parked car, and opened the door. Once I had my seatbelt on, he opened my shirt and fastened handcuffs to my wrists. In no time he had me locked in a cage with a chain around my neck.
I told him this dream in an email the following morning. Was it accurate? ‘Well, yes,”he typed "that sometime happens” with the smileyface emoticon he always used in our correspondence. “Being locked in a cage can be therapeutic, allowing a woman to explore deep emotions, or even relive past lives.”
One side of him was a sweet, sensitive type, with what appeared to be some deep insights that would have served him well as a therapist.
Over the months he devoted so many hours to chatting with me, I thought he must like me. Otherwise why bother? We used up the 40 euro fee in the first month, so he must see something in me, something to justify all this overflowing attention. male attention was something i craved at the time since i had been mainly celibate and living alone for most of my life, and now i was 49. given my circumstances, my failed love affairs, and a general feeling that marriage and long-term relationships were not for me, being alone was just the price I paid for my “freedom.”
in certain ways, Hans was superior to all other boyfriends. He was the first to point out that i had many traits and behaviours of someone who had been sexually abused as a child – what he probably meant was that I dissociated easily, like many who have been exposed to major trauma, and forgotten it.
****
I was saved from my quandary (of whether or not to attend the party) by a deus ex machina. one day in late June as I was sanding my dowel-dildo, the phone rang. my neighbour Jack had found an ad for a writer-in-residence position in british columbia for which i applied and got hired, bam, just like that. It was a two-year contract meaning there was no longer any question of my entering into a fake relationship with some perverted couple in order to write about them… there was no time to write the exposé about the international trade in human ponies... all that was out the window now as I had to start packing up my apartment, say goodbye to my friends – mostly the women in my writing workshops – hire a moving truck and fly west with my cat to become a college professor..
I strongly felt that my dear Master Hans had helped me by presenting me with a humiliating alternative fate that made me boomerang in the opposite direction. Thanks to the pressure, I had recovered my lost sexuality and also my true destiny: to be an intellectual, not just a pony but when I told Hans the exciting news he was very upset and tried to dissuade me from leaving montreal naturally i was surprised. what did it matter if i didn’t attend that silly party, for which no date had even been set? Westmount was a snobby neighbourhood and based on past experience, I would not have got along with the man and woman though Hans insisted they were very fondly looking forward to bringing me into their kinky relationship. Deep down, I had no interest in pursuing sex slavery with total strangers and to be honest, I was a bit bored with Hans and his snickering sadistic jokes which I had overlooked, back in February when I first hooked up with him. my early enthusiasm had been based on what I imagined were his “shamanic” powers as we soared through space, like Santa and his reindeer on some stellar voyage through the blackness. Back then, to me, with his shaggy beard and plump cheeks Hans was like some dark Norse god. Odin or Thor. So I felt a bit guilty, skipping out on him at the last minute, just when he’d set me up with the mystery couple, who I suspected were likely white collar crooks involved in some sleazy international scam like money-laundering. So in august i flew to kamloops leaving Hans in the lurch in Holland. Now I was living in cowboy country with real horses and ponies, but i continued to chat with Hans. I didn’t want be ungrateful. it never occurred to me, then, that he might have been paid a finder's fee for delivering me intact, that he now had to repay. he was tight-lipped about the details but when in an email he ordered me to quit my job and come to Holland immediately and be his slave for real, I laughed it off with a toss of my tail. I was a palomino now.
from time to time, I still chatted with Hans and also with other invisible men who responded to my "human pony" profile which he had insisted i set up. so i came to know quite a lot about that scene, which i was not interested in entering for real – some of the people involved in it are quite interesting to talk to, because they're in touch with a whole underworld that includes bikers and prostitutes and people in the music business --
and since i was stuck in kamloops for two years, where not much goes on after 5 pm, i was happy to have people to chat with when i got home from my teaching job in the evenings
in kamloops i was the single woman from out of town who got invited to Christmas dinner out of pity, etc – this had never happened in montreal where you didn’t need to be married to have a life – and I found my status at the college awkward, at times, but since I was teaching Creative Writing nobody expected me to be very grounded.
one married woman I got to know in kamloops was somewhat psychic -- she phoned me up about a dream she had had: "it's a very good thing you left montreal when you did because there was a couple there who were planning to kill you." a couple of years later another friend, also very intuitive, told me the exact same thing I decided they must be talking about Hans' mystery couple.- a fascinating possibility that could never be verified or even investigated without returning to montreal – which I had been warned against by the third psychic before I left Kamloops. she had me pull cards that were overwhelmingly negative about my life back in montreal – “don’t ever go back there,” she said. “as far as montreal is concerned, you’re already a dead woman.” So I moved to Greece, although my first choice was a town in BC called Horsefly... but that's another story.
**********
Years later later, i found out who the couple were.
The man was from old Montreal money, and his wife was from Washington and rumoured to have worked for the CIA. It was more than a rumour, I’ve been told. Their mansion, which they have now sold, once belonged to Canadian diplomat and politician Pierre Sevigny, who was implicated in a sex scandal back in the 1950s, when he had an affair with an east German spy called Gerda Munsinger. This scandal brought down the Canadian government at the time.
When they took over the property, back in the early 80s, the N's already had their intelligence connections. They were also involved in the world of journalism and their home became the meeting place for a globalist “think tank” with links to McGill University and the Allan Memorial and CIA psychiatry and the people who had electro-shocked my father back in the fifties when I was a child in Dr Cameron’s LSD experiments…
I learned who the Guests of Honour were at that party I never attended – one of the after-hours parties after most of the guests had gone home, while those who arrived late came wearing masks Their names appear on the Wednesday Night Club website for all to see: the famous newspaper baron and his dominatrix wife, who had bought the Southam empire a few years earlier – good old conrad "richelieu" and lovely wife barbara "antoinette" – 
pictured here at the fancy dress ball they attended in London on July 10 2000, about ten days before they attended the party in Montreal --
all this was on the website for the Wednesday Night Club which ran weekly without interruption for thirty years. It must cost a lot to entertain that often. The house sits on a property that cuts across a whole block. A covered passage, possibly a greenhouse, links the house to a separate garage that opens onto the next street, making it ideal for smuggling bodies in and out.
I’ve learned through the grapevine that at these parties, barbara amiable brings her own butcher knife. But that's another story, and I may never know for sure because my Christmas story in the Montreal Mirror, and my worst nightmare, never came to life.
When I visited the house one winter day in 2011,it was being renovated for the new owners. I circled the block, taking pictures that I posted at my blog. I wasn’t prepared for the weird energy of the neigh-bourhood – a woman leered at me from her driveway. A zombie-like couple on psych drugs trudged past me just as the neigh-bours' garage door lifted and a supernatural male voice boomed out: “AND NOW HE IS HERE!” – it was a CBC radio drama playing from the open window of an SUV that was backing out.
In my photos of the house, a Wotan-like figure with a long beard and pointed hat appears in one of the windows. 
I think I went on a Wednesday, Wotan's Day. Wotan, or Odin, was a Norse God whose cults still operate especially in Europe.
The CIA is said to be involved in setting up Odin cults that practice sex magic and ritual sacrifice. Odin’s special totem animal is the Horse. Of course these are just notes for a story i'm writing -- only the beginning of a LONG RIDE.
