supplicium post mortem

As a widow, I have a license to be bereaved, even two years into it. I cry frequently, and I’m not embarrassed about crying around other people, although these days I’m sometimes apologetic, as it seems a bit much in many circumstances to inflict it on others. I wasn’t always this way. Before I met M, I had a phobia of crying in front of other people. So I did my crying by myself. Over the 13 years I was with him, however, I gradually got comfortable(ish) with him seeing me cry. He told me that, contrary to what I believed, I wasn’t ugly when I cried; I was “so cute”. He said that when I cried it made him want to make love to me. Sometimes I wondered if he wasn’t provoking me to tears on some unconscious level, but on balance I think he wasn’t. When he died, my filters were so decimated that I couldn’t stop myself crying, or caring that I was crying, around anyone. I don’t think I’ve fully recovered the old filters, and actually, I don’t want to because I think it makes me a bit softer and more open as a person. It mitigates slightly against my reserve.

As a child, and still now, I found anger difficult. Lots of people are like this. Anger is Bad. Good people do not get angry. Anger is a destructive force–axioms of my personality. M and Mr. Prior did a lot of work over the years trying to rewrite some of the axioms, for instance trying to redefine Good as meaning honest & true, rather than Polite & Well-behaved. This is probably a long, boring topic for you, but the point is that my musculature is overdeveloped from holding in anger and other unpleasant emotions for most of my life. M did a lot to release this. The release normally took the form of tears.

This weekend I am in the industrial midwest, having travelled here with my brother and sister for my father’s 70th birthday. I’m the eldest and closest to my father, in contrast to my sister, who seems to have almost an allergic reaction to him. He’s a nice guy, a decent guy, an honest, hardworking guy. He’s also a workaholic, hard to connect deeply with, and prone to emotional tonedeafness. As a teenager and young adult, I felt a lot of anger towards him for having left my mom and thus destroyed our family. I’ve since forgiven him, and I feel a lot of compassion for him. Nevertheless, his behavior is sometimes very tiresome, and I have had a lot of it over the last two days, combined with trying to take care of his vulnerabilities while also taking care of my sister so she doesn’t go into emotional anaphylactic shock. Such is the way with family.

Last night I dreamed we were all together (my dad, stepmother, bro & sis) and my dad was talking. All of a sudden I said: “Fuck you, Dad. Just fuck you.” I continued with a string of angry f-expletives. He snapped and ordered me to go to the other room, just like I was little and he was ordering me to my room. I stomped off, part angry, part nervous of suddenly being in trouble. In the other room, I realized Casey was “in”. I think her shoes were even on my feet, and I was kicking stuff like she does, or wants to do, when she’s angry. I’m a little vague on what happened next in the dream when my dad came in to talk to us / tell us off. I think it was a combination of adult-me apologizing and explaining my frustrations, and Casey-me kicking in anger and shouting more provocative things.

I woke up from this dream and thought: I must be angry with him, who knew? But I kept thinking about the dream—you know how sometimes dreams keep drawing you back to think about them, as if they contain some kind of addictive substance? And what drew me back to the dream was the experience of Casey. I longed, and still long to be able to be back in her. Casey was frequently angry. Casey was allowed to be angry. Casey was allowed to scowl, to stomp around, to shout grouchy things, to make outrageous claims, to hyperbolize without rational tempering. M had a portmanteau for Casey’s go-to mood, which was glumpy (glum + grumpy). And Mr. Prior, the only person I have ever encountered in my life like this, he could deal with Casey’s feelings. He could take her anger. He knew when her misbehavior was anger, when her glumpiness was anger, when her sadness was anger, and when her anger was sadness. He allowed all of it, and he loved her so intensely when she was Bad, when she was out-of-control, when she was angry. He wasn’t afraid of it or her.

I think most tops, when faced with a scowling, sad-angry-provocative Casey Morgan, would conclude that she needing whacking and that I was indeed asking for whacking via “playing” her. It wasn’t like that. And he understood that. All those years of playing—if it can even be called playing—opened up huge wings inside the mansion of my personality, until they were more or less integrated, at least around him. But when he died, there was no longer anyone who could see Casey—See (deal with) her or see (perceive) her. I have to be a grown up all the time now, except when I am by myself. When M was alive, I sometimes found it a trial to have to be a grownup all day long at work. Now I’ve been grownup for 26 months straight. Now she mostly comes out in dreams.

I cannot tell you how much I want M right now, how much I want him every second, but especially right now. The last time I was here at my dad’s with him, we were looking through the famous & voluminous family photo albums. My father loved taking pictures when we were little, and you were often having to put on nice clothes and smile during photo shoots. I’d always loved these photo albums, but M saw them with different eyes. I remember him poring over some pages of me when I was two or three. I thought I looked happy (I was smiling), but he drew my attention to the eyes. Look how sad they are, he said. He pointed out  a lot of things in these pictures. I don’t enjoy looking at them anymore. The myth of the happy pictures was shattered for me. Don’t get the idea that there was Abuse in my childhood. There wasn’t. We’re talking ordinary life unhappiness that just didn’t have a legitimate channel for expression before I met him. Or so it seems.

If he was here right now, he’d hold Casey tight and call her by the pet names he had for her that said she was special and his and entirely safe and loved in his arms, no matter how she behaved. Once he called his real kid by one of those names and she got so jealous it wasn’t even true.

I’m sorry for complaining so much. I have an unbelievable amount to be grateful for. But Casey says being alive is unbearable. She’s a kid, so everything is exaggerated. Still…

He sat in the wing-chair, window open, admitting the sounds of assassin croquet. A timid rap on the door announced his second-eldest.

“Justin said you had a question?” Her tone conveyed mistrust of her younger brother, in this and everything.

He gestured to the footstool. She approached but did not sit.

“What?” she demanded, injured innocence.

“I’m wondering,” he said idly, “whom you are texting in the middle of the night.”

She crossed her arms. “No one. And if Justin says different, then you should talk to him about lying.”

“Differently,” he correctly. “Do you mean to say you aren’t texting after bedtime?”

“I’m not stupid, Dad.” Her voice exasperated, and so very plausible, as usual.

She’d talked him into the unlimited plan, promising to pay for it herself with earnings from her job at The Sno-Kone, and having agreed she would not violate her bedtime. He’d agreed, unwisely he saw now. He’d never been through this with his eldest daughter, who was too busy with her violin in Aspen this summer to be tempted by technology. His soon-to-be tenth grader, however…

“This plan is excellent,” he said. “You can’t exceed the limit, so we can avoid the run-ins that plagued us last year.”

She blushed and scowled. “That was the point, Dad.”

He reached for a paper on his desk. “Also, they provide the most helpful itemized bills, date, time and source of each text.” She blanched, and then burst into tears. “I think you’d better go cut a switch,” he said, setting the gas bill back on his desk.

Read other folks writing this week:

• Travis King
• Frenchies
• Rafi
• Nettagyrl
• Papatomla

3AM

The carbon monoxide detector just woke me the frack up because its battery is low. Those things are so fracking piercingly loud.

I was in the middle of a dream about accidentally outing myself to my family. In the dream, my RW father was here at the apartment (along with some other person or people). We were getting ready to go out for dinner or something, and he said that he’d meet me in the garage? Vestibule? Hall? On the way out, and there we’d discuss what had been happening (something I’d done that I shouldn’t?). He said discuss like RP, M et al used to say it, with a capital D. Except his wasn’t exactly capital, sort of a half-capital. I felt a flutter of panic and also a little excitement. The excitement (that he was maybe going to deal with casey) just outweighed the panic (that he knew about casey and tgi). Then, a minute later, he said basically we’d go to dinner after he’d given me my spanking, because then the air would be cleared and we could actually enjoy our food. Take previous emotions and ratchet them up about a thousand, with the panic part gaining ground.

We never got to a literal tgi confrontation, but later he, my sister, and I were more or less discussing it, and I was saying how I’d told her [not true RW!], but I hadn’t thought he’d find out. He was hurt and annoyed that I hadn’t told him, which he considered tantamount to lying to him. [RW he'd never think this! If he did find out, my guess is he'd just never mention it to me. Remind me to tell you about how I originally found a.s.s in 1995...] I was torn between feeling relieved and feeling that freak-out feeling that he knew; plus, who else knew?

Later, the person I’d told changed from my sister into my friend who I actually have told. [a writing friend I told in extremis of grief, a couple of days after M died, when I had zero filters and cared nothing for anything, including my own mortal life. This friend was actually unfazed (or seemed to be), bless her. Recently, when I confessed to blogging about tgi, she professed herself un-shocked and claimed that once her kids were in school she'd be "getting her phreak on" too. I think the waiting until they are in school is due to the fact that she's too fatally exhausted right now to get anything on.] So this friend was telling me the whole situation wasn’t a big deal.

Also in the dream (here’s the too much internets), I was twittering with tgi acquaintances, like Natty, Barrister, and Mija (whose tweets from the Shadow Lane event in Vegas I liked a lot), and there was a feature where you 1) shared del.ici.ous bookmarks and 2) had the equivalent of twitter wordwars, tweeting real time in teams about whatever topic you wanted and seeing which team could post the most words in a set time. I was trying to get the  hang of it all.

I must be really far gone if I dreamed my real father had decided to deal with casey and I wasn’t even squicked by it. Traditionally, when I dream that someone in my family knows about tgi, I’m freaked out and the dream takes on the quality of panicked nightmare. This time, it was only a little uncomfortable. Must be the effects of too much blogsphere and worrying about compromising myself with online exposure. But also, as I said, an unappealing sign of desperation. I really am tired of myself, and I don’t need a cranky carbon monoxide detector to show me that.

Last month I printed out and re-read “In Wine” and “In Wrath”, both by Ripping Yarns. The former was Mark-centered (Mark Aken, not my Mark): Hold-in Mark, age 18, feels guilty for getting drunk and asks for the whack, which Dad gives until the Hold-in lets the guilt go and starts to cry, cf. Jack Radcliffe in “First Half at Keene’s”, cf. all the hold-ins we know. In the second story, “In Wrath”, Dan mouths off to a neighbor and over the course of the story is moved from temper to repentance. Both stories are classic in that the climax is the same: the switch from Dad in the bedroom; and both are narrated by Dad, which seems to be how that series gets started. Both I read slowly and closely, more so than usually happens when I read on the screen. In both stories I was 100% with the author at every word. It felt as if I had written them, or M had written them, certainly someone who knew us that well. In some ways this dad had an edge over RP (I can’t believe I’m being disloyal enough to write that) because he was less coercive and calmer, although just as firm. Still, he doesn’t have RP’s playfulness or his lucky-dippy demeanor. But look, it’s no good comparing them because they’re so different; plus one is fictional and the other’s dead.

But I’m attracted to this character of Rip’s, to his unswerving moral compass; to his compassion and firmness which co-exist without conflict, in fact in service of each other; to his persistence; to his even-tempered nature; to his honesty; to his huge dependability. Even as a p.o.v. character, he is focused on his sons and their needs (which makes him perhaps a bit unrealistic?).

I don’t remember if I ever discussed Rip’s “In…” stories with M. I remember discussing “Keene’s” briefly and him saying it wasn’t his thing exactly but that he could see it was mine. He liked a more severe, non-con quality in his stories and fantasies, veering into the sexual. Less of the emotional stuff that I like. I can’t see him being too interested in these two stories whose implement is a very unaesthetic nylon cane/switch. Marky would also find them very wet because there are all these tears, but no marks from the whacking – s-nore, he’d say. Yet, M. would have liked this family, I think, and approved of a lot of it. Would we have been that kind of parents if we’d had kids? I wonder if he ever did read those stories and what he thought. I can’t quite grasp the reality that I’m not ever going to know.

except he’d have to follow through on the whacking front instead of leaving it to Uncle Jack…

perfect dad, perfect lap

A dream I had before Christmas about the father in Ripping Yarns’s series of stories about the Aken family. The “In…” series…

It was like college, and I was living with roommates. Mr. Aken, the dad from Rip’s stories, turned up. He found some glass shards on the carpet, evidence of a broken light, and this was an expensive and important light in some way. He looked to me and I had to admit I’d known about it. It wasn’t clear if I’d actually been involved with breaking it, but I had known of it and done nothing, which was wrong. I was flooded with guilt when he looked at me.

He walked by me and touched my face with his finger (long, slender, feminine), under my right eye and then just below my eyebrow, as if tracing the contours of the black circles there. Then he was holding me on his lap and I was 7 or 8, like Dan in one of the stories. He was wearing a plaid flannel work shirt and so was I. Mine was over-sized and both were soft, and he was holding me in that hugely protective way, and I was weeping because it just felt so safe and so good on his lap, even though I was in trouble – especially because I was in trouble. He told me he’d be able to deal with this matter even though he couldn’t be everything to me that I needed and wanted. Still, I cried in his lap because at that moment it was perfect. Even though I wasn’t his son, and couldn’t be his son, he could treat me the same as his son for this brief time while I was on his lap and while he dealt with me for the broken light.

When I had this dream I had been tutoring Othello heavily, in particular Act V, Scene 2: “put out the light, and then put out the light,” (1) the first light being Othello’s candle, of course, and the second being Desdemona’s life. I may not have put out M’s light myself, but am I guilty, in my heart, in some way, for not catching it, for all the uncountable failures that preceded and maybe led to his death, for all the times I didn’t love him enough, for fighting about taxes, for all the forever left undone? How can I ever be truly forgiven all of that unless I can be allowed to have him back and redeem it, put it right with him, love him fully like I always really have? How can I truly and really redeem anything without him?

(1)

Put out the light, and then put out the light:
If I quench thee, thou flaming minister,
I can again thy former light restore,
Should I repent me:–but once put out thy light,
Thou cunning’st pattern of excelling nature,
I know not where is that Promethean heat
That can thy light relume.