supplicium post mortem

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!

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.