supplicium post mortem

Not cunt. I have no problem with cunt as a bit of anatomy. The c-word I can’t stand is the one with nine letters starting with c and ending in y.

Community.

This word acts like smelling salts on me. Possibly I am scarred by too much time in Quaker environments, but whenever people start talking about Community, or about The (Something) Community, I feel sure that a lot of sentimentality, censoriousness, and identity politics is headed my way.

But I can’t seem to find a better word to describe what I was hauled into over the last couple of weeks.

I’m sure readers of this blog all read The Spanking Writers, the only daily non-pro spanking blog on the internet (to my knowledge). So you will all have read in March about the anthology of spanking stories they are putting together. I was flattered last winter to be asked to contribute. I was less enthused last week as the deadline approached.

Why did I agree to this project? I wondered gloomily. I almost passed on it in the first place, because I am busy, because my desire to write about kink has basically shriveled up and died, because I have begun to feel I just write the same thing over and over, and who wants to hear it anymore? But then I had a chat with myself. Self, I said, you are a writer and you propose to turn down publication because you feel ambivalent about kink and because you are busy? Writers don’t do that, self. Get real! So in the end I said yes to Abel and Haron and promised to have a story to them by the deadline, June 30.

Over the last few weeks, the subject of SW stories began to turn up in my twitter timeline. Other people were working on them, too. Other people were chasing this deadline. Other people thought their stories sucked. I wasn’t alone.

Add to this the fact that my story had been inspired by my visit to the Trinity College Library with Emma Jane in January. Add also the fact that Serenity offered to trade edits with me, and with her comments gave my story the structural sorting-out it so desperately needed. Add the excitement trickling into the Twitter feed as people got previews of each other’s pieces. Finally it dawned on me: this was a community activity, and I was having fun.

I know, alert the media.

So when I say I was hauled into the c-word, I mean that Haron and Abel, with their project, initiated the best of community building. They set people a task and let people get on with it. And even I—the girl who loves the sidelines, who has lost interest in blogging, who feels the deepest ambivalence about spanking, tgi, kink, and life itself—even I found myself engaged, boosted, enjoying trading stories, agonizing about deadlines, moaning about process, and knowing that Abel and Haron were reading our pieces and putting them all together almost as if we were part of a class, or a team, or a…

The word still sticks in my craw, but the thing itself is a blessing. So thanks to Abel and Haron, and to everyone else taking part. Sometimes you just need hauling into things.

Perhaps in contemplation of my New Year’s Anglo-Irish jaunt (weather permitting), last night I dreamed again of parties.

In this dream, I was visiting some friends, Mr & Mrs Lovely, before a party they were to give. Mr. and Mrs. Lovely were sitting on chairs, but another American visitor and I were lounging around on the floor. We were all joking and bantering. Mr. Lovely, American-friend, and I were sort of wrestling. Cheeky remarks and gibes were coming out of my mouth. He wrestled with us playfully, but he didn’t push it when he felt my uncertainty. American-friend wrestled differently, like she meant it, like she wanted to lose to him, like she intended to get herself smacked.

Soon the hangout dissolved, American-friend went upstairs, and it was time to get ready for the big party. But Mrs. Lovley was berating Mr. Lovely, telling him to figure out a way to get me to play. She felt it was his duty as a man to get creative and help me out, “so that she can get past this one place and start to live the rest of her life.” Mrs. Lovely had the idea that I was frozen about crossing this threshold, and that simply being able to play around at a party would draw me firmly into real living. She felt somehow that if I remained an observer at this party, I’d be missing a chance to stop being an observer of my own life. He, paterfamilias, needed to take initiative.

I’d earwigged their conversation and was burning with embarrassment. The thing was, I explained, I was deeply ambivalent about playing. Mr. Lovely was paying attention to me now, and the vague quietness I’d observed when visiting in the summer was now a kind of pregnant sensitivity. We faffed around in this uncertain tension until I asked if I shouldn’t simply list all my fears. Mr. Lovely said, “I think I’d concentrate on the possibilities.” So I picked the thing top-of-mind: Just who would be seeing little Casey?

To ask this question was already to have come a long way off the sidelines. To voice this question revealed that I was capable of imagining Casey being present. I was in fact already imagining falling into her, and into her clothes, and secretly inside I already was starting to feel like Casey. The question revealed, also, everything about how I play: in role. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say: wearing a costume so that other people can see what this inner me is all about.

I couldn’t endure the idea of playing as X (my real name) because X is a grown-up, pulled-together, balanced person. She isn’t especially fragile (though she isn’t the iron clad maiden she was in my 20s), and even though she manages a certain amount of frank vulnerability, it’s all on the verbal/literary level; it isn’t immediate or physical. There’s an adult distance about it all. To play, though, means to allow forward a part of myself that is not very X. This part I call Casey, and over the years with M, Casey developed beyond a label and into a full-blown person. ¹ To play as Casey, who is an extraordinarily vulnerable little girl, more so than when M was alive, is to make visible the psychological reality of playing itself.

So Mr. Lovely and I were pondering this question: who would be seeing little Casey, and why? I explained again, as if it needed explaining, that she was scared, bereaved, lonely; she would not be very robust. Yet, someone dealing with her couldn’t allow her fear and bereavement to dominate. The point, as Mrs. Lovely had put it, was to nudge her over a frontier. I don’t think she   would cross it willingly, but if she turned up to a scene, that would be consent enough. At the same time, if someone steamrollered her, or gave the impression that he didn’t understand her, or didn’t base his command on that understanding, then she would merely comply in a mechanistic way. It would be robotic, and not only fail to accomplish any threshold crossing, but it would scare her away worse than now.

Understandably, Mr. Lovely found this all a bit overwhelming. Mrs. Lovely and I went shopping for the party, and on the way back she almost ran over a bunch of schoolkids. I yelled and grabbed her arm; she swerved to avoid them, just. She was angry at me. I apologized for yelling and for touching her. She said that she was never going to hit them. I very much doubted it.

Back at the house, I hoped to find Mr. Lovely to talk. I was beginning to imagine a scenario—the very fact that I could imagine something seemed to be a hopeful sign. What if, I wondered, Casey had brought home a bad school report? It would be terrifically shaming for her, since she’s such a good student. She would have bollixed up the first term at her new school out of an inability to join in. The same reticence that kept me on the sidelines at parties would have caused every kind of problem at this school she was attending. She’d avoided homework and then avoided the consequences, she’d offended teachers with her silence, which seemed to them churlish and sullen. They certainly didn’t understand her, and this had made her worse. It was a train wreck.

A discerning interlocutor would be able to see what her teachers couldn’t see. He would realize that she didn’t need yelling at, that she was already ashamed beyond endurance, and that it was her sadness and this boil of emotions that needed addressing, not her homework per se. At the same time, she had not behaved as she ought. She had declined genuine offers of help. She had indulged in procrastination and avoidance. Most importantly, she had allowed herself to carry on until she reached the state which now tormented her. How could she treat herself like that?

It couldn’t be a guardian with a real relationship, because that would be fake. Casey has no relationships with anyone but TL. But what if it were the man of the house where she was staying over the holidays? He, perhaps, knew some of the staff at her school, perhaps her form teacher. In any case, he had her report in hand whether or not he’d any right to it, and as a grown up, as the best available representative of loco parentis she had just then—in that fleeting, un-ideal moment—he intended to have a word with her, even though he had no previous relationship with her, even though he would have no serious relationship with her beyond that holiday. He didn’t appear bothered by the unofficial, presumptuous character of the interview. He was paterfamilias, she was a child under his roof in need of guidance, he intended to provide it. End of story.

The dream ended before anything could happen, before I could even speak to Mr. Lovely again. We were in a building high up in the Gotham skyline, almost as high as the Empire State Building (where M and I met). A storm came upon our skylighted room, blowing rain in the cracks. I woke up.

I overthink. I overimagine. I rehearse excessively in my mind. But it was always this way. M and I wrote over three hundred long emails each before meeting. We, especially I, explored tgi and ourselves from every possible theoretical angle. I can’t endure reading the correspondence, in part because it’s too grievous, but also because it’s so very tedious with all of its intellectualizing. I hope I’m not intellectualizing that much now. But, as I live alone with my dogs and my computer, words, dreams, and thoughts remain my chief vein of experience. And I suppose this kind of rehearsal is preferable to an impetuous, confused, disaster of a real-life play encounter.

Of course, party play isn’t the same as deep play, and role play as other people know it is, I suspect, a distinctly different activity to playing Casey. I don’t know, yet, if there is anyone amongst my acquaintances capable of playing with Casey. Besides, being on the sidelines of parties isn’t a bad thing. At least it’s being at the parties.

And—just as I was bringing this to a close—let’s not leave before putting under the microscope the glories of my reserve. If I stepped off the sidelines, it would mean sacrificing this quality of mine—that I don’t play, that I am charming and nice and only a visitor from afar, that I am not a pawn in gossip, not an adherent to one side or another in whatever drama is unfolding, that I possess a lofty wisdom born of distance and of not having a horse in the race. Why should I want to give any of that up? Then I would be just like everyone else. I would be part of everyone else. Feuds and tensions would involve me. What I did and said would start mattering to people personally; I would start offending people on more than an intellectual level.

And—this is the heart of it, isn’t it?—I would grow attached. My massive, neglected needs would come out of the deep freeze, and then where would we be? I will tell you: in torment. I would have allowed myself to need these people to the core (with Casey even!), and then I would be all alone again at home in Gotham.

Also, I know my heart. It is essentially monogamous. Certainly it has room for friends, deep true friends, but that is distinct from its central longing. Which is a way of saying that even if I did live in the land of parties and could join in on equal status as everyone else, I would still be…well, wounded after an honest encounter via Casey. Wounded in the sense of having undergone a surgical procedure.

People talk of sub-drop, but this is more serious. Sub-drop as a term implies a neuro-chemical depression after extreme stimulation. Like a hangover or a post-cocaine crash. You did something very intense on a physical and emotional level, so you felt “high”, you “flew” as some people like to phrase it, and now, as a prelude to normality, you have come down from that high, a disagreeable descent.

I’m not looking for a high. I’m looking for a Real. I’m looking for a breath of real, intense air on this planet where I have not been able to respire. You flew, you dropped—a normal course of things. You finally breathed, now you must again hold your breath—not.

If I was still 26, if I had never lived a real life, this would not be so difficult.  But I have. I know what I’m toying with. I know what kind of heart I have. I know how it feels to live, how it feels to be a phantom, and how it feels to long for a life I can’t have. Of these three, it’s the last I dread most.

LOL Day, as you probably know by now, stands for Love Our Lurkers Day. This event has for the last five years been organized by Bonnie, as a part of her ongoing, devoted efforts to bring people together. So before we go further, Thanks Bonnie!

casey in her boater hat this summer

As this blog has ground nearly to a halt, it probably has no lurkers left. But in case you are new or not-new and still lurking–a warm hello. Maybe today will be the day you leave a comment and delurk? While you’re thinking about that, here are some pictures of casey in some of her hats for you:

When I started this blog, in a half-blind urge to speak of the part of my lost marriage I couldn’t speak about with everyday people, I thought no one would want to read a blog with a subtitle like “whacking, bereavement, God.” Who besides me would want to read about all of those things, what’s more at the same time? Apparently, there are people who do, and many of those people have become real friends. Without those friends and this blog, it’s hard to imagine what would have become of this shrouded part of my character and my experience. To those friends–giant hugs.

If you’re a return or regular reader, you will no doubt be thinking: why doesn’t Casey blog more?! I’m not entirely sure, beyond the normal excuses of life getting in the way. But if I were to be really honest–and what are blogs for if not that kind of risk?–I suppose I could guess a couple of other reasons:

1. Bereavement. It continues. How many times can I write the same thing? I am wary of losing friends by turning into Casey-one-note. So increasingly I keep it to myself.
2. 

   winter uniform hat

   Ambivalence about The Scene. As you might have gathered, I’ve gone to a few parties in the last two years. I haven’t yet played with anyone else. I haven’t had a romantic date. I haven’t kissed anyone. As time goes by I wonder, increasingly, whether I ever will do any of those things. Many of my friends write about their play dates or parties, but I don’t want to write about these things. First, I think it would be churlish to write posts about liking but not liking a certain party. Ditto with writing about being depressed by prospects. If the Scene depresses me, it isn’t because there’s anything wrong with the parties or people at them, it’s because of a mismatch between what I need and what’s on offer. So, I don’t see how it’s productive to complain.

3. Anxiety about outing. Because I work in a sensitive sector, and because of the integral role church plays in my life, the prospect of being outed scares me. I’m quite cautious in my face-to-face encounters, and I try to be careful about what I write, but sometimes fear grips me, especially when I read about other people being outed by vindictive former friends/partners. This has made me self-conscious about some of the fiction I write because it strikes me as the most vulnerable part of this blog. I have no inherent qualms about the stories I write or the kinds of experiences that attract me, and I find them all fully compatible with professional integrity and with my fairly orthodox religious beliefs. My worry is that my interests are so open to misunderstanding. I mean, I live in a cosmopolitan city. If my employers or fellow parishioners were to read that I got up to a bit of kinky adult sex in my marriage, so what? But there is a lot in my writing that could be misinterpreted. So I worry.


casey's peruvian hat

4. Real world writing. I do write fiction in my regular life, and that has been waking up from bereaved coma and taking more of my time and attention over the last year. When I started this blog, I thought of it as a kind of CPR. The CPR has more or less worked, and while I do not feel like a whole or healthy person, I can’t say I have not been resuscitated.

In other news, I fell off my bike and broke my elbow last month. I’ve acquired a roommate/free lodger in my sister’s boyfriend, who fell victim to some shady real-estate maneuvers and found himself evicted with 4 hours’ notice last week. Before he moved in, I had visitors staying for six of the last ten weeks. Besides that, my garden has been very busy and demanding (until elbow broke), the various channels of work are very busy, and the current novel is moving itself to the front burner. So there you have it. Nothing too thrilling.

I think, on this day of appreciating friends known and unknown, I’ll leave you with a passage from C. S. Lewis’s The Four Loves. It’s from the end of “Friendship”. I do like what he is saying about Christian friendship, but I also think it applies to all true friendship.

Christ, who said to the disciples, “Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you,” can truly say to every group of Christian friends “you have not chose one another but I have chosen you for one another.” The Friendship is not a reward for our discrimination and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each the beauties of all the others…They are, like all beauties, derived from Him, and then, in a good Friendship, increased by Him through the Friendship itself, so that it is His instrument for creating as well as for revealing. At this feast it is He who has spread the board and it is He who has chosen the guests. It is He, we may dare to hope, who sometimes does, and always should, preside. Let us not reckon without our Host.

When I was little, my family went to a local amusement park once each summer. It was called Boblo Island, and it was on a little island in the middle of the river. You would drive Downtown and board an old-fashioned river boat, one with wooden dance floors and windows selling cotton candy, and you would ride this boat an hour or so out to Boblo Island, where you would disembark for the day. Boblo was a good amusement park with kiddie rides and adult rides, but although it occupied the entire island, it wasn’t as extensive or as ambitious as places like Cedar Point or today’s Six Flags parks. Still, I remember entirely happy times there, on rides like the swings or the flume or the tilt-a-whirl.

The Comet

For years and years—into my 20′s—when I would get scared or very unhappy, I would summon to mind Boblo Island to soothe myself. I got into a habit in my 20′s of staying up far too late at night and subsequently freaking myself out with fear of ghosts. When this happened, I’d think: Boblo. Boblo! and I could avert a panic attack. I haven’t called upon the Boblo talisman in years, though; I don’t think it holds sway any more.

The other day, while I was kicking around the corridors of bereaved quasi-madness, the dogs informed me that regardless of my mental, spiritual, or emotional state, they still required their evening walk. Teary-eyed, I leashed them up and we went round the block.

I felt fragile, hung-over from crying, and not entirely in control. My mind ranged to friends I could call, but found none that seemed appropriate at that moment. Then my mind embarked on a fantasy involving some friends I visited this summer. It’s weird to fantasize about your friends; it’s the kind of thing you don’t confess out loud. You wouldn’t want your friends to think you were obsessed with them, or unattractively unstable, or clingy-needy-gross. But I suspect a lot of us do this secretly.

As my dogs were sniffing their way around the block, I was imagining going to the cottage where I had visited these friends of mine. It was cold and rainy around the block, and it would be cold and rainy at the cottage, too. My friends, the couple who owned the cottage, would welcome me, in my ragged, teary, distraught state. She would enfold me somehow and speak to me soothingly and incomprehensibly in Irish, and then make me sit in front of the turf fire while she prepared something for me to drink. He would secure the cottage and assure me that everything was quite safe, that nothing bad was going to happen there, and he would fetch me a dog to pet and cuddle. The two of them would sit with me and not say very much, although she would periodically come out with an unexpected, impulsive remark that would make me cry because it was so shiningly true. They would treat me half as their child and half as their friend. The rain would blow against the window panes, and the dog would be damp, and I would be safe and soothed and understood, and uncrowded there in the cottage with my friends who were in some ways so close, and yet distant enough that I could be entirely myself with them.

That is the kind of secret Boblo Island that comes to me now, when I am 41 years old and so very grown up, and don’t know what I am doing in the world.

Recently I had the opportunity to inspect a friend’s toy collection, cleverly hidden inside a hockey bag. She had some particularly appealing straps, which I found myself wanting to try out on Marky. She also had several nice canes. (If my friend is reading this now, she will probably be shouting that the word nice should never share a sentence with the word cane.) Even more surprising than the desire to whack Marky was the discovery that after more than two years, my eye was still “in.” I discovered this when I arranged some patio chair cushions over the back of my friend’s sofa in preparation for demonstrating the art of caning.

Back in the day (e.g. when M was alive and I actually topped from time to time), I was the inferior top. He had better aim, better everything. I was a pretty shabby top altogether, I always believed. Now I think my insecurity wasn’t entirely accurate. When I took my friend’s canes and applied them to the misbehaving cushions, I found my aim good, my wrist snappy. My friend seemed to think I was hitting hard—and it was only 50% or so. I started to think maybe my topping experience hasn’t been normal, only having topped one person, a boy who liked to take a lot and hard.

Now, back in my own home, I have begun to wonder if I actually possess implements any more. I think they must have disintegrated in the closet, or got lot permanently wherever I put them away that I can’t now remember, like my work SIM card, or my husband.

A few days before encountering my friend’s hockey bag, another friend showed me her flogger. It was purple and brown and beautifully crafted. She let me touch it, and it seemed like it could be soothing and massage-y.

“Do you want to try it?” Friend Two asked casually.

I froze with a polite smile on my face: “I don’t know!” Friend Two didn’t push it; she just set the flogger down on the picnic bench where we were sitting. I remarked that if she’d told me it was a massager, I’d be all over it, but the word flogger was too scary.

But scary how? Certainly I wasn’t afraid it would hurt. I was afraid, on some paralyzed emotional level, to have anything to do with an object labeled Flogger. To use a flogger on myself , or to let someone else use it on me, felt at that moment like it would be crossing an invisible yet indelible boundary. It would mean engaging with kink on a level beyond the verbal. It would be in a way like a first kiss—the first kiss in this life after M.

My real first kiss (excluding stage kisses) came very late, at age 20, and by that time kissing had become a barbed, electrified barrier. I’m not sure I remember my first kiss with M. (Insane!) I remember the hug when we met for the first time, on top of the Empire State Building, and I remember the heavy make-out session on my futon, the first time anyone had touched me in a few places, and how hugely, overpoweringly exciting it was, like nothing I’d ever imagined.

But as for the flogger offered to me casually as a mere sensation experiment, I must have frozen because I was afraid to cross any physical barrier into anything that smelt even vaguely like kink. (How I hate that word, but when I use my word, tgi, people always ask me what it means, so I come off as elitist, speaking a dead, obscure code. But I miss that word. Lots! Come back to me!!) To have played with the flogger, even lightly in fun, would have been to step off of the sidelines and into the play. I wonder if on some level I was thinking, or Casey was thinking: If I do that, then people will start misconstruing my conversation and think I want to be whacked, and I don’t. Just like Casey was saying (it must have been her even though I didn’t know her name yet) before that first kiss at age 20: If you kiss a boy, it means you want to have sex with him.

I was terrified to kiss that first boy, but after two nights of faffing about (and confirming with my promiscuous roommate that kissing did not equal consent to intercourse), I finally kissed him. It felt strange, but not bad. His mouth tasted of popcorn, which he had been eating. He was a freshman and I was a junior, which was seriously robbing the cradle. I remember that night he asked me what I wanted. I was still adjusting to having crossed the first kiss frontier, though I didn’t tell him that. He said he wanted a Relationship, and asked if I did, too. I said I’d like to get to know him a little first. We dozed off, fully clothed, in my narrow university bed. A couple of days later, I heard in the dining hall that he’d started dating someone else. I was blindsided, embarrassed, crushed… Still, it was a good first kiss. I wasn’t in love with him.

Besides first-kiss boy and M, I think I’ve only kissed two other boys. I am 41 years old, and I know this is not normal. My sister makes out on almost every date. Even if she’s bored with the guy, she’ll make out with him to see if he gets more interesting. I haven’t kissed anyone except family, on the cheek, since I kissed M goodbye that morning 26 months ago. It’s not that I’ve resisted; there’s been no opportunity.

by Richard Dadd

Still, if the opportunity to kiss a man ever comes again, I’ll probably be afraid to cross that threshold. I think in person I can come off as very reserved, bordering on cold or conceited; the truth is I’m scared, paralyzed in a way that makes no sense when I explain it. I’m scared of sex, scared of kissing, scared of playing, and apparently even scared of touching a friend’s leather toy if it bears the label flogger.

In the Land of Fairy, you must never eat the food or you’ll have to stay there. If I eat the food in this new world—this hateful world without M—will I have to stay? Of course, this world isn’t like Fairy. We’ve got to stay no matter what, and there’s only one way out—the way he already went.

Where does the time go? Three-hundred sixty-five days ago, I came out from behind a sort of veil and started this blog. The reason, while not deliberate, was fairly obvious: I needed someone I could talk to about this whole part of my life, this whole part that I no longer had, in a sense.

Back in the dark ages (1990′s), I had a website. Quite my-first-html, it contained stories Mark and I had written and was a front for the conceit of Home School (a small domestic boarding school RP and TL started together in “Ireland” after M moved here to Gotham to live with me). After a while, I let the site lapse, and eventually took it down. M and I weren’t part of any public scene, and while we had a few online friends, we knew even fewer of them in real life. So, eventually, to me at least, the site felt like a kind of exhibitionism that I no longer wanted to maintain. So it went away. Now, when I think about some of the things on that site, I cringe so much I could poke out my own eyeballs.

Fast forward to 2008/9 when personal websites had been supplanted largely by blogs. I knew this and had visited the occasional tgi blog, but the blogosphere can be overwhelming. Just contemplating the extent of it made me feel I might hyperventilate. Also, people I knew who blogged (non-kinky) seemed to be entirely consumed by it. Since, in my regular life, I also write, I was protective of my creative energy. I had for several years been trying to pare back hobbies so that I could actually complete large creative projects. I didn’t have time for blogging. If I started up with that, when would I have time to do my real writing?

Eight months after becoming a widow, however, my real writing wasn’t happening. It, like so much in me, felt dead. So in that sense, I had nothing to lose starting a blog. It might, I reasoned, even serve as a kind of CPR. I was done being a taskmaster to myself. I was done with Should’s. I was done berating myself for not Accomplishing enough. If writing a few tgi blog posts distracted me briefly from the crushing desolation of a widowed January, then hallelujah. If it kept my creative heart from stopping, even barely, then Thanks be to God.

And this is what it did. Sometime last spring, the flash fiction began. Several months of that was the key factor, I think, in enabling me to return to my regular writing last November during NaNoWriMo. In that way, and in so many others, my resuscitation commenced. It is far from complete–far from it–but I think it is safe to say it is under way.

And besides regularly and sincerely thanking God for this (atheist friends, avert your eyes), I also feel a profound gratitude to all of you, and to the other friends I have made, online and off, over the course of this year. You have read my gushy outpourings. You have borne witness, sometimes silently, sometimes not, but always palpably, to the love and to the suffering. You have patiently offered hugs and encouragement, over and over. You have not criticized.

To all of you, to each of you: thanks.

You will have noticed by now that, in violation of convention, I do not have a blog-roll. Blog-rolls are great. They are how people find like-minded friends in the dizzying blogosphere. They help drive traffic to other sites you like. However, they have always stressed me out, and because of this, I have avoided adding one. The stress comes from two sides: when I see myself on someone else’s blog-roll I feel: Yay! They like me! and I feel part of an In crowd. When I am not on someone’s blog-roll I feel the opposite: they don’t like me! Or, they don’t know about me! I am a pariah. Neither of these attitudes is edifying. So, to try to detach from them, and to avoid the stress of worrying about whom to include on mine, and whom I would be offending by excluding, I have worked with a different rubric, which is to link to people within posts, when I’m responding to something they have written, or when they join in a writing game with me. Anyone who writes with me gets a link, and I always comment on the stories that come out of challenges I’ve posted (so long as I’m aware of them).

However, today is a day for celebration, not of me and my superhuman brilliance at having blogged for a year, lol, but of the friends who have made this year worth living. Therefore, in lieu of a blog-roll, here is a page written in partial appreciation for all of the wonderful bloggers I feel so lucky to know. You can also find it via the friends tab in the header.

Again–to friends known and unknown–thank you.

Not that way, perverts. This is about the other kind of playing you do with yourself when you find you have lost your playmate.

Playing with yourself is hard, as previously discussed here and here (among other places), and it is most unsatisfactory for exercising anything but your imagination (and even then only a fraction of it); but, playing with myself is what I have been doing for the last twenty months.

Mostly this takes the form of conversations between TL and Casey, or me and Casey. Sometimes Casey turns up around other people, though she is pretty careful only to show her face around people who won’t recognize her. Once, for instance, we were going around a part of a wildlife park where you could pet the smaller animals. We were with a younger relative, and Casey was “in” 100%. There was one part where there were mice and squirrels nesting inside socks. Casey started literally to jump up and down: Socks! They sleep in socks!! Younger Relative was also experiencing cute-overload, though he was a bit more stiff upper lip about it. At one point he said, Oh, it’s your inner child. I said, That is exactly who it is! Unfortunately, I couldn’t introduce him to Casey just then, lol.

As a child (APD) I played with my dolls a lot, when I wasn’t at rehearsal for children’s theater. My brother and I were close in age and played together, but he was in many ways an unsatisfactory playmate. He was terrifically stubborn (a necessary defense, probably, against my bossiness) and although he could be made to go along with my schemes, he rarely seemed to make anything up himself. Also, he was a musical prodigy so from a young age spent hours in solitary practice of his instrument. So, I played with my dolls. Sometimes, now, it feels like the same thing. The only difference (besides the lack of dolls) is that I know now what real playing is, with a real playmate who will invent with you and move the play along and surprise you and blow your mind. I know enough to miss it.

M used to play all the time, in every way, not simply roleplay or tgi. It’s hard to convey, or even to think of an example. The plastic seedling trays were labeled by him. The onions say, for instance, unyons. Maybe you had to be there.

Last summer I went back to Englandland for the first time, and I met a couple of people whom I described to my mother as “blogging acquaintances.” Friend 1 took me out to lunch and then wandered with me through the streets of Eton. I had not wandered around Eton since I was eighteen, but it hadn’t changed much. We walked and talked, and then it started, inconspicuously. Watching a begowned teacher walking down the street carrying books, we caught our breath. “Except,” she said, “he should be carrying something else.”

Imagine a giant permission slip.

And so it continued, casually, as asides to the regular conversation: “Oh, I’d like to report to his study after games.” or, apropos of some boys in sports kit bending over to pick up gear, “Oh, you can stay just as you are, thank you.” You have probably done this kind of thing  yourself.

I think I might have burbled a bit to dear Friend 1. Simply talking this way was like being awakened from a kind of winter’s sleep. I hadn’t realized until just then how very much I missed it.

Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago when I found myself g-chatting with Friend 2. We both type as fast as we talk, so the conversations tend to be dizzying, but at one point she said something about us going back to Switzerland. It was some kind of typo, as we had never been to Switzerland, at least not together, so I joked, “We had so much fun, didn’t we?”

She didn’t hesitate: “I know!”

Me: I liked that youth hostel where we went hiking.

Her: I preferred the chalet.

Me: It was very pretty, but you know that guy broke my heart.

Her: He had the most awful sweater!

Me: So true! I was blind…I miss that rather authoritarian rest cure place.

Her: Oh, man, no kidding.

Later, I realized: she was playing with me. I had a playmate! You may think I am grasping at straws, and in fact I am, but the point is how it felt to play, even with faraway Friend 2 via text chat, or faraway Friend 1 last summer. It felt like moving after being locked up for longer than you can remember.

This week, Casey has been pressing hard, against whatever it is she presses. (viz. the experience that gave rise to Double Teamed). One way it expressed itself was a powerful desire to buy her a dress I’d tried on at H&M. This dress was so cute (gray flannel pinafore, buttons up the back, tie at waist, knee length) and I thought Casey would look so cute in it. Unfortunately, it didn’t fit very well (I have a large cup size and it was fitted in the chest). I was bemoaning this to Friend 2, saying it might fit if I lost some more weight. Friend 2 suggested I get it and put it in the back of the closet, knowing that from H&M it couldn’t cost that much. So, yesterday, we went back to the store and I got the dress for Casey, in gray and in navy. And, now it even fit.

Home we get from the store, but she couldn’t try it on yet because TL had a student. Turned out the student needed help with a Latin translation, and it turned out one of the words was verberare, which, we discovered, means to flog. It was very difficult to keep Casey in check at this news. She tore open her own dictionary and scoured the page: verberabilissumus, altogether deserving of flogging! At one point TL’s student forgot what the word had meant.

Casey: To flog!

Kid: Oh, wait, I thought it was to beat.

Casey: Right, flog, beat, whip.

Kid: What’s flog mean?

TL at this point asked Casey to fetch something from the other room while she defined flog for the kid. When Kid worked out that the criminal in his translation was being threatened with verbereris, his response was, “Wow, harsh!” Casey had to be sent on another errand at this point.

Finally, TL’s lesson ended and Casey was allowed to put on her frock. Navy blue, white blouse, navy gym knickers, white ankle socks, black school shoes. And let me tell you, Casey has never been more In for the last twenty months. My body was taken over by her, walking like her, skipping around, even – wait for it – smiling. I felt quite literally possessed by someone else. Except I knew her. I had known her. It had been a  long time.

As regular readers probably know, I have gone to a few tgi-oriented parties here in Gotham during the last six months. Those who have encountered me at those parties will know that I have not played at them. I haven’t really written about these non-play experiences. I love to read other people’s reports of play dates and parties, but I’m reluctant to write about my own experiences. I guess I don’t want to be the object of anyone’s blogging, so I shy away from talking about other people. I don’t mind people reporting that they had tea with me and that I am brilliant and charming, but I wouldn’t want an intimate play session shared with the internet. I’ve only written about some of my past scenes because my partner is dead. I don’t want to come off as censorious–to repeat, I love reading other people’s reports and do not disapprove in the slightest. Why, then, can’t I imagine writing about my own encounters? I can’t argue that I’m too shy to reveal myself. Heaven knows I’ve revealed the most essential parts of myself, repeatedly, right here. Maybe I’ll change my mind when I actually have an encounter to report.

Because here is how these parties go: I turn up, people are standing or sitting around in a central area, other people are off playing (behind screens or in playrooms). I get a glass of water. I eat a pretzel. I chat. I tend to be more relaxed talking with girls, probably because I don’t imagine any subtext to those conversations. Rightly or wrongly, on some level I trust women because I don’t think they’re trying to play with me. I don’t mistrust men per se, but there’s always the specter of possible play, no matter how respectful or even uninterested in me they are. So, I chat easily with girls (unless they’re acting frosty due to seeing me as some kind of competition–what a laugh), and easily enough with men. What do I chat about? Well, recently, I heard all about winter carnival arrangements in the midwest; I discussed scuba diving; I heard about motorcycle culture; I heard about the extent of the Scene in various other locales. All this serves, ultimately, to establish an ordinary human connection with my interlocutor, to remind us both that we are regular people who happen to have this hobby in common. Sometimes people show me their toys. I appreciate toys, as I would appreciate someone’s fountain pen collection. But do they turn me on and make me want to play? No.

I tell everyone that I am not playing. I explain I am bereaved and not ready to play. Everyone is respectful. I should take whatever time I need, they say; I will know when it’s right, and I must do only what I want to do, they say. We are all agreed on this point. I think I must confuse people, nevertheless, because here I am chipper and friendly (I hope), yet not playing. It isn’t as though I’ve gone with a partner or even with a group of friends. Given my solo status, why am I there, again, if I really really don’t want to play?

Sometimes people think I need reassurance, as if I’m a novice trying to take the plunge. They suggest that—when I am ready—I should think about finding a friendly person and just doing a little friendly scene to get my feet wet. Perhaps I do need to get my feet wet. Perhaps I don’t. But the more time I spend at parties, the more I begin to feel that it isn’t going to happen in that kind of environment. And, whatever you might say about my situation, I am about as far from an anxious novice as you can get.

Let me try to explain why—and before anyone feels hurt, it’s nothing to do with the parties themselves or the people at them. The parties and party goers are all welcoming, respectful, and just fine. The truth is that when I turn up at a party, I am actually about a million miles away from casey, even though I borrow her name. The person attending these parties is my ordinary, workaday self, under an alias. This person chatting away about spanking, scuba diving, history, whatever—this person could just as easily be on the telephone with some vogonic city department sorting out a business problem; or having a conference about some kid’s learning issues; or chatting with college or theater friends at their parties. This person is rational, confident, witty, empathic, together. This person is not casey.

As I was leaving a party recently, I was trying to imagine what would happen if I were to go off in one of the playrooms with some man I knew a little, a man I trusted to be moderate and not creepy. Off we would go, away from the party, and it would be just the two of us. And then, well, I’d have to dredge up casey. Why? Because casey is the channel through which I play (as a bottom). “Casey” is the label for that part of me, that vulnerable part of my personality, that young, gently cheeky, highly emotional side of me. The ordinary me has no interest in going across someone’s knee. The ordinary me is a completely together woman. So, here I would be with a man I knew only slightly, and suddenly casey would have to appear, or there would be no point to our encounter.

This, friends, is the sticking point. Because casey is something that was between me and M. And now casey is orphaned, scared, and bereaved, more bereaved than even I am. *

Is grief an activity or an emotion? Certainly, over the last year and a half I have allowed grief to work on me, as I try at church to let the liturgy and the music work on me. I don’t know how much it all penetrates to the part that is casey. Probably that is very protected and cloistered. It hurts a lot—a lot—even just now thinking of her and feeling her in my heart. I try to love her and take care of her and not bully her and do what I heard M say that awful day when we were interring his ashes.

God: casey wants to die. She doesn’t think there is any hope for life without Marky and RP. She hates people. She refuses to trust anyone, now or ever. She says I can quit going to these parties and quit blogging and quit tweeting and give all her clothes away to the poor.

So… of course I am not going to these parties to play. I am going simply to meet people and with luck make a few friends. And the thing with casey is that before she can be whacked or even spoken to in a toppy way, she needs simply to be seen. I mean that literally. No one has seen her face, no one has called her name—to her—in over 18 months. Just turning up in a room, wearing her clothes, and having someone speak to her, not a grown-up pre-match conversation, but as casey, as little casey. Someone would have to address her as a real person, not in some costume-shop top mode—young-lady-this-&-that, you’ve-been-very-naughty, etc. She might not even be able to speak the first time. She might sit there like some mute, traumatized orphan. So someone would have to talk to her, gently, not in a cotton-wool way, but like a strong adult with good boundaries and plenty of compassion. Like a real person would speak to someone in her circumstances. Just having someone speak to her like this might make her cry in about five seconds. It might be a long time, many such encounters, before it was anything like a good idea to introduce the idea of discipline into the relationship. Because—guess what?—whacking isn’t what it’s all about for casey, or for me. At least not now.

This, then, is why I am a dud at parties. I’m grateful to people for continuing to invite me. I guess no one ever claimed that the grief-stricken were any fun. I guess putting up with us is a kind of mitzvah. So…thanks.

* apparently a kind of theme/variation on this rant re. casey & play

You sit at home, admit it, and say to yourself: I wonder what Casey Morgan is doing right now? I mean, how does she actually go through her day, like a Real Live Person? Mind-blowing to contemplate, I know. It is also dizzying to try to keep track of the various kinky weekends occurring around the globe just now. But please do not imagine that Casey Morgan is that type of jet-setter. Her existence is in fact tremendously prosaic. Evidence? Very well. Please find below Exhibit A: Friday, November 6, 2009 as lived by Casey Damn Morgan.

It is technically a day off, so she sleeps super-late, until 7:45 AM. Drags self from bed, puts on to-be-washed black clothes: cords (commando), socks, shirt, zip-top, winter coat, shoes, sunglasses. Leashes dogs and takes them to small park (for ball), then large park (extendo-leash walk). This is the typical morning routine. The weather is wintry cold, sunny, windy, leaves turned, many on the ground. You really have to pay attention or you will lose your dog’s offerings in the leaves.

Après park, she drinks the last of yesterday’s cold coffee, exchanges dirty clothes for dressing gown, and puts laundry in machine. She feeds the dogs. She addresses an item on the whiteboard: Coil. To do this, she goes down the rickety basement stairs and drains the water from the boiler, a procedure rather like That Thing for furnaces. It’s been taking longer and longer in recent months to get the water to run clear. Do all the pipes in this 100+ year old building need replacement? Why, boiler? Why?

Next she takes a shower, dresses in clean clothes, dries her hair, starts the dishwasher from yesterday, and sits down at the computer. She reviews email. She posts 3F wildcards. She reads the blogs and tweets of friends, kinky and otherwise. She goes upstairs to change the laundry over, and while she’s there, she digs through a box for some photos she promised to find and scan for a friend. Unfortunately, these photos are in the same part of the box with some photos of M when he first visited and moved here. There is Marky, grinning cheekily, laying on her kitchen floor (painted red then) with her first Wolfhound under his head, wearing white t-shirt, jean shorts. There is RP in tweed jacket (so much hair then!) sitting at the desk in her old study, looking rather severe. She bursts into tears at it all, puts the photos away, and bends over the railings sobbing, actually talking out loud to him, telling how desperately much she misses him.

She pulls herself together and goes back downstairs. She makes a phone call to follow up on a work issue, only to discover a major, unfixable snafu. This snafu falls under her responsibility, though it is only her fault because she is not a mind reader. Nevertheless, she phones her boss’s office to apologize and explain. That done, she socializes more with kinky online friends, and after brushing one of her dogs and folding and ironing some laundry, she turns at last to NaNoWriMo.

Casey writes NaNoWriMo with one of those full-screen bare-bones word processors, called Q10. It takes her back to the days of DOS amber screen computing on her Apple IIc or Leading Edge Model D. She bangs out a little over a thousand words, making up yesterday’s deficit.

It is now 1:15PM. She puts her Clairefontaine notebook and Pelican Demonstrator fountain pen (with brown ink) into her bag with the rest of the stuff she needs and proceeds to depart the hip banlieu of Gotham where she resides. The subway is busy as is Gotham itself since the Yankees are holding their victory parade. She goes up to the Met, enters at the side to avoid crowds, pays her customary $1, checks her coat, and heads upstairs. The museum is packed to the rafters, as if half the Yankee parade-goers decided to hit the museum afterwards, making a day of their trip into town and hoping to compensate for taking their kid out of school by dragging them around a museum. Casey makes her way through the Egyptian wing to the Concerts & Lectures office, where she buys tickets to four concerts in the upcoming year. She then wanders up to the American galleries to see American Stories. It proves appealing, but she doesn’t have much time today, so she looks at a few paintings and makes a note to come back another time. She proceeds to the Zen garden in the Asian wing, where she sits for 20 minutes and adds more words to her NaNoWriMo wordcount, albeit longhand in her Clairefontaine notebook. Uncomfortable, she relocates to the Temple of Dendur for another 15 minute writing stint. After wandering by her favorite pieces in the Greek and Roman gallery, she retrieves her coat and walks through a dimming, cold afternoon, down the park, to the Carlyle Hotel.

Here she is to meet some friends from church, who have invited her to tea. Not seeing them, she sits in the lobby and adds another page to her NaNoWriMo wordcount. Finally, her party arrives, and they have a lavish, beautiful, and (for her) expensive tea for nearly three hours. They have already decided amongst themselves that they are treating her, and while she feels somewhat guilty about this, she accepts with thanks and does her bit by working out all the complicated calculations for them about how they’re going to split up this baroque bill.

She bids farewell to the Episcopalian ladies and walks down Madison and Park in the dark. She can feel a line across her bottom, where her camisole is tucked into her tights, like a tramline from a cane, but less painful. The beautiful, rich old buildings are more romantic without the midday work crowds. They make her feel like she’s part of the city, part of history, part of beautiful places. She takes the train home to hipsterville, walks the dogs, and turns to evening chores: emptying the dishwasher from the morning, putting away laundry, and buying a “bouquet” of cotton twigs (with cotton on them) to put in a vase. Casey rarely buys flowers, but the surprising cotton plants catch her fancy and appeal, perhaps, to the mood which has threaded through the afternoon. At last, it is time to change into what her sister-in-law tweely refers to as “comfies” and see what the internet has been getting up to.

After blogging about herself in a frankly narcissistic fashion, she will try to round out her word count for the day. Maybe she’ll try again to read the disturbing novel that has been set for her church reading group, but it is likely that Miss Lincoln will forbid this on the grounds that descriptions of torture are entirely unsuitable bedtime reading. And in this case, Miss Lincoln would be right. Torture scenarios are a hard limit for Casey Morgan. Reading about the fates of Christian missionaries in 1600′s Japan makes her queasy.

So that is it, a fairly busy “day off” in the life of Casey Morgan with a special treat in it by way of the tea date. Writing, work, church friends, kink, dogs, Gotham–these compartments do not appear to connect, but inside her they do. When she turns out the light, she will hold that silent but intimate conversation with the one who is always with her, and she will hug the little silk pillow, like she used to cuddle up to the one who is no longer with her. And so will end another day, another extension on this life, another gift perhaps, another mandate–but to what? For what? How long?

You know how it can take years to get a reference, or even realize there is one to get? Even at my advanced age (ahem), I can still be blown away by my ignorance. This Monday, exiting the British Museum (as you do when you’re in Englandland, and find to your appalled surprise that the reading room is closed until 2012!), I saw an ice-cream van. It looked like this, minus Rupert Grint, sadly.

So, finally, I got the joke. Lemme splain:

Back in the day (13 years + ago), Marky & I used to be friends with a venerable English m/m top called Mr. Penn. Mr. Penn was IRL a retired school teacher, in addition to being an encyclopedic top. We did a day of school with him on two occasions (once on April Fool’s Day – poor him!). Mr. Penn knew the score in every way, but of course we made fun of him when he was out of the room for his particular verbal tics, and his rather twee way of referring to some of his implements. He called his favorite cane Mr. Whippy. If you carry on with that, Hastings, you’ll have an appointment with Mr. Whippy! he’d threaten. Marky would snigger. The whole time I just thought this was some babyish nickname, plus I thought personifying one’s implements was gay. Now it turns out I was missing the point. Doh.

But speaking of Mr. Whippy, I would quite like to see Rupert bending over for Mr. Penn. He would  be made to improve his schoolwork and not drop out at 16, make movies, and buy ice-cream trucks. I still remember how to spell government after hearing Mr. Penn’s voice drum it into me (and into my bottom with his slipper). TGI works, kids!