supplicium post mortem

Today is a very exciting day, but unfortunately, it isn’t the kind of thing I can celebrate with my mom. I’m telling you, it’s very hard to stop myself calling her up to say, Hey, Mom, a story I wrote is being published today!

If I did that, I’d have to explain further. Well, Mom, the book is called The Spanking Collection, and it’s an anthology of spanking stories written by 20 of the best spanking writers around. It’s edited by my friends Abel and Haron (some of the “writing friends” I’ve visited in the UK), and the stories in it are diverse and fun and moving and hot and–and, no, Mom, these people aren’t strange. They are some of the nicest, normalest people you could meet, and guess what? This whole book is for Cancer Research UK. That’s right. The contributors all gave their stories (or introduction or artwork) without pay (yes, me too, I know, Mom, but seriously, no one is getting rich writing short stories), Abel and Haron covered all the publishing costs as well as doing the editing, layout, Kindle-creation, and the rest of it, and all the profits are going to help people find cures for cancer. Yes, I know that cancer isn’t just one big disease like polio, but the point is that the people at Cancer Research UK surely know this too, and once they get the windfall from this book, they will know so so much more! Ok, but, Mom, you get the point, right? And, yes actually, I think you could tell everyone in your therapy group that your widowed, church-going daughter is also a published author of kink. They would cheer you on. This is New York, right? Please, I’m sure you’ve heard much more unsavory things from them. Right? Exactly.

Well, if you want to buy the book, you can get it in paperback here, and on Kindle here (oh, right, your Kindle died within the first month when your water bottle leaked in your purse, never mind), and for more links there is Haron and Abel’s blog here. I love how you always buy copies of my books, Mom. Thanks for buying this!

But, Mom? Even if you buy a couple of copies, ok ten, please will you do me a favor and just not read my story? No, it’s not shocking or anything, and, no, I am not the lead girl, Charlie, and no one in the story is you; it’s just that I’d rather you didn’t read it. Like, there’s nothing the matter with either one of us having sex, but it’s just better if we don’t share that with each other. No, Mom, there’s no sex in my story. There’s kissing, but that’s it. And, well, it’s a spanking book, so, well, but, the point is that my story is called “The Library”, so avoid pp. 110-122, and yes, I am Casey Morgan, and no, please don’t Google that, ever. Yes, that is the name I use for the blog I don’t let you read, and please, can we keep it that way?

No, this story isn’t on my blog, and as a matter of fact this book is the only place it will appear because all of us writers agreed to write something special and original just for this anthology and let it appear only there. So, there is nothing for you to see on my blog, nothing at all. And the point about my story is that I got the idea for it after taking a trip with my friend Emma Jane to the Trinity College Library in Dublin. (The Motherland, right? Top o’the morning to ya, my darling mother!) Emma blogged about it here, and that is another link I would like you please not to follow, but you can give it to the people in your group and they can see how much of the story is indebted to Emma’s imagination and not really mine at all.

Ok, look, if you have to tell them something, just say my story is about an English schoolboy and an English schoolgirl who kiss and get in trouble, and there is a library in it.

I am sure you are right that my story is the best one even if you never read it. Let’s just agree that it is, and you can order copies and give them to your friends from therapy and from the Village and never read mine and support Cancer Research UK and all will be right with the world. Great! Love you, Mom!!!

Dinner to celebrate? Sure! xxxxxxx me

We should’ve got up late. It’s a holiday, and although I had things to do, they weren’t until later. I should have woken up with him wrapped around me, his hand doing something to my nightclothes so he could feel my bottom. He would whisper into my half-asleep ear about Marky, how naughty he’d been, how TL ought to see him in the afternoon and do a proper uniform inspection. He’d whisper to me about Casey, too. RP and TL had decided that she had got out of hand. She hadn’t been misbehaving, though, I’d protest groggily. No, he’d agree, and that was a symptom of the problem. Things had been too hectic, and clearly she was in need of some quality time with Mr. Prior. Movies? I’d ask. Across his knee, more like, he’d say. I’d cuddle back to him, feeling him pressing against me. We’d carry on along these lines until the wolfhound came to the side of the bed and licked us, whining that we must get up. He should have taken the dogs out in the sub-zero morning. I would have made the coffee. He insisted it tasted better when I made it.

Perhaps we would have pottered around doing chores until my physical therapy appointment. It should have been a day when both Casey and Mark got seen. Mark would have reported to TL’s study, or the house-room. Casey would have been summoned upstairs to RP’s crimson study—the one I keep thinking I ought to use more as a writing space, but can’t. I should have told him about the dream I had the other night, in which I was some rebellious prep-school boy cornered by an exacting master, my nemesis. He was going to give me six, and they were going to hurt, a lot. He told me to bend over, and he produced a fearsome (and improbable) cane, rigid and ridged, rather like Abel’s walking stick. I/my boy avatar was scared. The master held the cane against my bottom and waited. I mentally prepared, told myself to breathe, not to clench, to stay down, that I could take it. Still, he waited. I trembled. The door to the study was open, and passers-by peered inside. Yes, the master said to the peeping boys, this is what happens when you break the rules. He lifted the cane; I inhaled; the alarm rang.

Today was the kind of day that could remedy interrupted dreams, though I wouldn’t fancy a RL encounter with that sort of stick.

In the real day, I dragged myself from bed when the wolfhound insisted. After throwing the ball around the sub-zero park, I dragged the dogs home and embarked on morning chores. I organized the chaos of unrecorded to-dos. I tackled some email. I went to physical therapy. I walked around the city by myself imagining tweets I would write if I had a smart phone, and things I would do if it were the day it ought to be. I went to Muji and found a pair of pyjamas that fit perfectly. They are what M would call whack-me pyjamas. I thought about how much he would like seeing Casey in them, and how cute she would be in them.

And I thought about how he was the one who really got ripped off, not me. I have more life to live, I have great friends, I am healthy, the rest of my family are all alive, I can pay the bills, I have great dogs and a nice place to live, a garden in summer, neighbors who look after me, the best church in the world, and the love of God whether I deserve it or not. He didn’t get to live more than 45 years. He didn’t get to see his son grow taller than him. He didn’t get to have children with me. He didn’t get to read the things I’ve written these last three years. He didn’t get to read the things I’d written when he was alive but hadn’t shown him yet. He didn’t get to see me Sunday night, at the story slam competition where I read After the Party, a little fantasy featuring someone like him; he didn’t get to see me wearing the tartan skirt I’d just bought; he didn’t get to see me win the competition. He didn’t get to grow old. He didn’t get to see his projects blossom. He didn’t get to be with me when I really knew how to love him.

It feels perverted—and by this I mean fundamentally unsound—to put on outfits that look cute when there’s no one around to appreciate them. The Russian lady who inflicts bikini wax (plus) on me insists that you do things only for yourself, my dear, not for anyone else, only for yourself. While there’s something comfortingly self-sufficient and feminist and self-actualized about that, the sentiment rings hollow somehow. Connecting with others, depending on others is part of being human. I tend to agree with R.R. Reno that the opposite of piety isn’t unbelief but sovereign desire. So perhaps I can be forgiven feeling unsound wearing cute outfits that he can’t see anymore.

And of course beneath my noli me tangere exterior, I secretly long for attention. I’m not exactly the kind of girl to ask for it, but I get jealous of other girls who garner attention. Having been round the houses with this once before—coming out of my twenties—I’d say my reticence is not coyness, but a kind of armor. I know I can’t have the sort of attention I really want, so rather than seek out something I think will frustrate and hurt me, I work on ideas like humility, on not looking to other people for validation, on being grateful for what I have, on getting used to the idea that this will probably be it, and that it’s enough to get through the day, and I’m not in a war-torn nation, not oppressed, not cancer-ridden, not a million bad things, so I need to stop feeling sorry for myself and try to be of use to other people.

In the day that should have been RP would have had a chat with Casey about this attitude. He would have reminded her of her Four Things. He would have paid her several sorts of attention. In the evening M and I would’ve watched House on tv. Would he have liked Lie to Me, or would he have found Tim Ross a plonker? It would have been–should have been–the kind of day where you don’t mind that it’s winter, that the night comes soon and lasts long.

It was Lessons & Carols at church, I’d been chosen to read one of the lessons, and I was trying to decide what to wear. My church wardrobe is limited—I wear a lot of black, though in the last year not exclusively. I’d chosen a black skirt, but before I knew what was happening, Casey was pulling her jumper, school blouse, and tie out of the closet and was putting them in the bicycle pannier with TL’s skirt and shoes. I wondered jocularly whether Casey was going to do the reading.

Casey said she should do the reading because she’d been promised a Lessons & Carols reading since that time before. She was referring to the time fifteen Decembers ago when we went with M, Marky, & RP to visit M’s Public School. The students were on vacation, so we got to tour all his old haunts,  including the chapel. RP said Casey was doing one of the readings for College’s ¹ Lessons & Carols, and he made her practice it right there in the chapel. Ever since then, she’s been expecting to go.

When we left the house, Casey’s smile seized my face, the shy but irrepressible little smile she has, because she had dug out her clothes and was taking over my reading. We rode to church and changed into this hybrid outfit, Casey from the waist up, TL waist down. Then the parish-house whirlwind took over, and I forgot about Casey. At least, I didn’t feel her anymore; I was too focused on where I had to go and what I had to do.

As I went about my preparations, I started getting compliments on my outfit. The Rector said good morning and then stopped as if something about me had distracted him. He said he liked my tie, and then he paused, searching for words. “You look like… a young Etonian,” he finally said. Her school tie, shirt, and jumper look nothing like an Eton uniform of any era, so why did he say that? It felt at that moment as if he had glimpsed something unexpected, yet entirely familiar, but couldn’t find a way to describe it adequately.

An unprecedented number of people commented on our wardrobe. They liked the tie. They liked the look. My mother’s friend said I looked “like a little schoolboy.” I looked “about twelve.”

I am over 40. My hair is shoulder-length and not at all boyish. I was wearing a 3/4 length black skirt and TL’s dress shoes. But these were the kinds of comments I got all morning.

My only conclusion—Casey is visible, and she’s recognized, if not by name. Apparently, it’s obvious.

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.

I don’t know if I want to write this post. Maybe I would rather pretend this is a usual, boring day. Maybe I would like to pretend that the thing that bothers me most is that a colleague is dying of cancer and I can’t bear to see her 13-year-old daughter, my student, left without a mother; and so maybe what I really need to do is bake a cake so I can send a big chunk of it home with this girl this afternoon. It scares me to feel death so close again. Maybe I would rather think about this instead of the fact that today is my wedding anniversary.

Nine years ago was the day I can honestly call the happiest day of my life, as cliché as that sounds. Nine years doesn’t sound long enough. Wasn’t it more like twenty? Could so much have happened in a mere nine years? Could I have lived the seven best years of my life, and the two worst? Could I have lived not only that best day, but also that worst one?

We married in church, in the chantry chapel rather than at the high altar, on a snowy, frigid Saturday in February 2001. About 80 people came. There was ivy and white roses. I wore a dress that had been made out of the antique lace of my mother’s wedding dress. He wore his kilt. I was never allowed to know for sure whether or not he wore anything underneath it.

I walked down the aisle with my father, M waiting at the end, as the organist played Elgar’s Nimrod. Seven years later, I would walk down a parallel aisle behind his coffin, to that same music—though that second day was a much bigger event, at the high altar, hundreds of people, Fauré’s Requiem.

But let me tell you about the rehearsal on Friday night. It was just me, him, our two witnesses, and the Rector. We had decided to do the 1662 ring vows [With this ring I thee wed, with my body I thee worship, and with all my worldly goods I thee endow: In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost]. At the rehearsal the Rector said: If you want to do this properly, this is how it goes… And he took the ring and demonstrated how M should slip it onto the end of my finger three times—in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost—only slipping it fully into place on the last word. There we were, the Rector and I, and all I could think was: OMG! It’s popping the cherry with this ring!!! And then I was blushing and cracking up and I couldn’t stop, and it was almost as bad as the first time I had to kiss a boy, onstage in Cinderella, when the rehearsal dragged on and on because I couldn’t stop laughing and flinching away. M kept a discreet distance during this ludicrous display of nerves, and eventually I pulled myself together and we carried on. Later, and from then on whenever we recalled the rehearsal, he always laughed, shaking his head, about how Casey had turned up out of nowhere and interrupted it all with her snickering.

One of the readings, a common one at weddings, was the Song of Solomon 2:10-12. “Rise up my love, my fair one, and come away! For lo, the winter is past… the voice of the turtle is heard in the land.” In later years, when I was learning letter-press printing, I set this text and did a big print of it. The print still hangs above our bed—my bed—and reminds me of the overpowering relief I felt that day, and all the days I knew him. The long winter was indeed past. Rise up my love, my fair one, and come away!

There wasn’t a big party. We had a small reception with cake in the parish house, and a dinner with the family at a restaurant. Then he and I left for a long weekend at a B&B upstate. I couldn’t get the time off for a honeymoon then. We would take one later, in the summer, we said. We were still waiting to take it seven years later when the marriage was ended by the only force acknowledged in the Book of Common Prayer.

I still wear both of our rings, albeit on my right hand. Death ends marriage, but it doesn’t feel ended. I wish there was a rite to help you take off the rings.

And you know, I was never going to get married. Maybe this surprises you. My parents split up when I was thirteen, and unsurprisingly, it devastated me. I came of age in the 1980s and early 1990s amidst a very liberal, feminist education. There is a video interview of me in my early 20s—conducted by my little sister—in which I say we (meaning the girls in our family) don’t believe in marriage. We don’t think much of men in general. We could do without the whole patriarchal construct. Instead, we would have lovers. (I am paraphrasing, but that was the gist.) Of course I wanted a boyfriend, even a life relationship, but I figured if I met someone and we were serious, we wouldn’t need the “crutch” of matrimony to stay together. And if we couldn’t stay together without the institution of marriage, then we shouldn’t be together, full stop. But then—about three years after this arrogant but defensive interview—I met M, and the world as I knew it passed away. Gradually, as we were together, as he moved here, as I realized this wasn’t a “practice relationship”, I began to feel that marriage wasn’t necessarily just a patriarchal institution. And somewhere in those first six years, I came to know that I wanted to marry him, before and through God, not because I wanted to secure him, but because we already were bonded together for life, and I wanted to sanctify this bond. I wanted to be “bound” together via the only authority we both acknowledged entirely, the authority, we both believed, that had brought us together in the first place.

http://malesubmissionart.com/

But let me not get theological. You know, Pandora tweeted today (actually re-tweeted) about a beautiful blog I’d never seen before, Male Submission Art. I am a switch, but a lot of male submission kind of turns me off; also, I am generally so much more stimulated by bottoming, that I often wonder if my switchiness was just a desire to accommodate M. But then I look at this site, and oh gosh, some of the images are so hot to me. And as I was perusing the blog this morning, I thought about how much M would have liked it. At least I think he would have like it. I think it would have been right up his alley. Maybe we could have taken some pictures like that. God, I wish he was here today to look at it with me. God? Please love him extra special, from me, not just today but every day. Every single day, every hour, every second.

http://malesubmissionart.com/

Last week I was fortunate to visit the Morgan Library and Museum, which has recently reopened after an impressive renovation.

A complex of buildings in the heart of New York City, The Morgan Library & Museum began as the private library of financier Pierpont Morgan (1837–1913), one of the preeminent collectors and cultural benefactors in the United States…Mr. Morgan’s library, as it was known in his lifetime, was built between 1902 and 1906 adjacent to his New York residence at Madison Avenue and 36th Street.¹

To my knowledge Mr. Morgan is no relation of mine, but I can’t claim to have researched the genealogy. Any anyway, the point is the dyed-in-the-wool sexiness of this museum! The main part of the museum is clean, well-lit, and modern, but you can also walk through a devastatingly sexy trio of rooms in the 36th street building.

Let us begin with Mr. Morgan’s library. When I entered this room, I felt the opening of pores, the hunger, the sigh of breath that come upon me when I enter beautiful, old buildings of an academic and/or ecclesiastical character. The British Museum Library, for instance. The Bodleian, the 42nd street reading room, not to mention any number of churches (recently, for instance, St. Vincent Ferrer, where I went to hear a lecture on the “vices and virtues” of the New Atheism). Readers who share my penchant for libraries will want to acquire this bit of crack: The Most Beautiful Libraries in the World. The guard inside Mr. Morgan’s library was delighted to answer my questions about how one moved between the levels. He pointed out the shelves which were actually secret-compartment doors concealing staircases. Among many other things, the Morgan has quite a collection of Bibles, including a Coverdale Bible. This room so impressed me that I let slip to my companion, an older lady from church, that the room was like porn to me. I’m not sure if the silent look she gave me was sympathy or distress.

Moving around the Rotunda, we enter a scrumptious little room called the Librarian’s Office (click for bigger). It was impossible not to imagine being sent there, a misbehaving young visitor, and made to sit still in that red armchair while the Librarian completed his or her paperwork. Then, I am afraid the red sofa would come into use one way or another. There was more than enough room here to swing a cane, a strap, or any implement the Librarian might keep for such occasions.

Finally, we enter Mr. Morgan’s study (further tour here, which you really must visit if only to see the desk). This room so overcame me that I was forced to sit down and try to regain my equilibrium. Forget photos of scantily clad men. Forget tgi drawings, videos, stories, etc. Nothing–and I mean nothing–could have been sexier to me at that moment than this high-ceilinged, red-wallpapered, book-lined, stain-glass-window-decorated, wooden-furniture filled study. My friend and I rested on an upholstered bench which had been set before the fireplace. I have absolutely no idea what she was thinking about, or could possibly have been thinking about besides what I was thinking about, viz. being summoned to this study and dealt with by Mr. Morgan (uncle? father? grandfather?) in the most traditional manner. Later, I distracted myself by perusing the shelves, which appeared to focus on fiction, including many early (first?) editions of Dickens. The only thought I felt able to share with my friend was a celebration of the 19th century novel. They were long! Very long! As novels ought to be. So there.

Afterwards, my friend and I had a bite to eat and got a little drunk in the cafe. We wound up talking until closing time. She told me that although our church is brilliant in every way, she did not think I was going to find a suitable man there. I agreed heartily, though probably not for the reasons she had in mind. Conversation eventually degenerated into talking about M. It reminded me how very much he is missed, still, by people besides me.

But! The Morgan Library=kinky destination! If I ever have the pleasure of entertaining like-minded kinksters in town, I know where I will take you.

p.s. I realize I forgot to say that Jessica’s post Library Tales got me thinking about this outing and thus inspired the post. Thanks, Jessica!

Don’t you wish you could do that more often? I can think of several conversations, subsequently requiring mind-bleach, which wouldn’t have got to that stage if I’d been able to safeword, lol.

As previously discussed, I’ve never really played with safewords. This isn’t out of any philosophical stance, but simply because they proved extraneous in my play relationship and in the few scenes I did outside that relationship. Another common practice that has never quite entered my play is the warm-up. This probably has to do with the fact that when I play, it is always–through role–real, in which case a warm-up would seem at cross-purposes, and thus on some level probably pervy. I think, perhaps, I have been missing something.

I’ve no idea why, but this morning popped into my head a memory of a trip to the doctor for planters warts. This would have been just after I met M, probably just after my first trip to Englandland to visit him (three weeks of a dark December in Surrey). Planters warts are a painful and difficult-to-eradicate infection usually in the sole of your foot, in my case in the flesh of my heel. You have to soak your foot twice a day, scrape with a razor blade down to the roots of the thing, and then staunch the blood with a salicylic acid preparation. (Sorry, graphic part over.) Let us simply say that in addition to the expected kinds of pain, I was experiencing considerable discomfort during that trip.

Eventually I broke down and visited the doctor. Doc confirmed that it had gone beyond the soak&scrape stage and that the only solution now would be to freeze them off with liquid nitrogen. He warned me: this could get quite painful, and I should let him know if I needed him to stop. I, overflowing with confidence borne of newly discovered tgi play, told him it was fine. I gave him my stoic face. He put my bare foot up on the table and took out something that looked like a blowtorch. I blanched.

Ok, he said, I’m just going to keep on with this until you tell me to stop. It’s not going to hurt at first, but then it’s going to start hurting and keep getting worse.

Me: Sure.

Doc: Oh, and you should know that the pain is going to keep increasing for a while even after I stop, so you should tell me to stop before it’s at the absolute limit. K?

Me: (gulp, nod)

This was an interesting exercise: to safeword, but to have to safeword before you’d reached your limit. You didn’t want to do it too soon, because then the treatment wouldn’t be as effective, but if you left it too late, you might find yourself in an agony you didn’t want at all. It was, intellectually, quite hot.

Today me and TL had a big fight, maybe the biggest one we’ve ever had. It was like this: I rode my bike to church, which I do most of the time as long as it isn’t snowing, raining, or snow/ice on the ground. I’m allowed to ride even when it’s really cold (like last weekend in 17° F temperatures) so long as the streets are dry. RP was fanatical about bike safety [concerned & attentive in the face of a hopeless cause, ed.]. He disapproved of i-pods while biking, got furious when I rode in the rain, and insisted I carry rain gear at all times in case I got caught out and had no other alternative but to ride in it. He also forbade me to ride in the dark without a lamp. He dished out some strong whackings over violations, I can tell you.

So, anyway, it was cloudy and damp, but not raining on the way to church. Then, just as I had changed and was wheeling my bike through the crowded lobby, it started chucking down. One of the Vestrymen said, “Casey Morgan, you had better put your bike away and come back for it another day.” I peered out and was intimidated by the downpour. I started to take my bike back down to the basement, but then decided to ride to the subway and take the bike back that way. TL gives me a warning look that says, Just because you look cute in your rolled up blue jeans & sneakers does not mean you will be allowed to ride home in this. Outside, though, the rain isn’t that hard, and I decide to risk it.

I plug in my earbuds, put on the Glee soundtrack, and take off the wrong way (only 2 blocks!) through midtown traffic. TL hits the roof and starts calling after me to come back and what do I think I’m doing, etc etc etc. But I do it anyway.
It takes 35 minutes to get home, it’s 36° F, and by the time I get back I am soaked through. TL is waiting for me at the door, ready for murder. After standing over me while I towel off my bike, strip, stand under a hot shower, dress and dry my hair, she hauls me into the study.

Showdown.

She has calmed down somewhat, but still she is incandescent. I trot out the standard responses to her lambasting: other people were doing it; Lance Armstrong rode in the rain; I rode extra carefully and didn’t have any accidents or close calls; I got warm and dry as soon as I got home. She wasn’t having it, though, and she was losing her temper. I knew full well, she said, that if RP were here he would crucify me. I deserved the cane, just to start, and probably That Thing too. I gave her a look that very clearly said, Sucko,TL, cuz he isn’t here, is he?

“Don’t you look at me in that tone of voice!” she thundered.

She was scaring me. I tried to calm her down. “Look,” I told her, “I know I shouldn’t have ridden home in the rain, and I’m sorry, but you’re worrying about something that didn’t happen.”

Did I not agree, she asked, that riding in the rain was dangerous?

I did, actually. Drivers get nuts, my breaks don’t work as well, the road surface turns more lethal than usual, and the soles of my sneakers slip against the pedals.

So what if I had got killed? she demanded.

“I would be happy to die,” I said in all truthfulness.

She stared at me. “Be that as it may, there are a lot of people who would be devastated and possibly have their lives ruined if you died, especially after…” I blushed, feeling suddenly ashamed. “And what if you weren’t killed but only injured,” she continued. “What if you could never ride your bike again, or walk the dogs, or write?” Damn. She had me there.

Me: I know. I said sorry.

TL: Why didn’t you just take the train?

I told her how the train took longer, was boring, cost $2.25, and was a big fat pain with carrying my bike up and down all the stairs.

TL: So, all things considered, would you do it again today? Honestly.

I thought.

Me: Um, I guess I would.

TL: Why!?

Me: Because nothing bad did happen except it was a nasty ride and I got cold.

TL (standing and yelling at the ceiling): Dear God, send me someone to deal with this wretched child!

So, off she stomps. I hear her crying in the other room, and I feel bad because she’s right about the danger, but I hate her for not being able to do anything about it.  I decide to get my mind off it, but just then that other one shows up. You know her. She’s the one who writes most of these entries, STEALING MY NAME!

Her: Casey, you aren’t being very kind to Miss Lincoln.

Me: Sue me.

Her: I’m serious. The point here is less bike safety and more trust. Miss Lincoln has been trying harder than any human being could to take care of you, hampered as she is. And today you showed her how little you care for her efforts.

Me (quietly): I care.

Her: How caring is it to leave her feeling powerless to stop you risking your life, as she sees it? How caring is it to push the point and remind her she can’t really stop you doing anything?

Me (even more quietly): Not very?

Her: You knew you were upsetting her. You even agreed with her about the danger, but you did it anyway because you were willful, weren’t you?

Me: Yes?

Her: Do you think God would like you tramping all over Miss Lincoln when she does everything possible to look after you?

Me: (small voice): no.

Her: And I know that sometimes you just need to be bad because you’re so tired of being good all the time. And because you’re so angry about everything. Right?

Me: (nod)

Her: Just try not to be so callous towards Miss Lincoln while you’re getting on with that, all right?

I mean—Geez! How fair is that to be double teamed, especially when one of them almost never talks to you?! So now I feel super bad about how I acted to TL, and I know I should be in trouble for riding in the rain, especially on a horrible day like this, but as per usual, there is nothing to be done about it. So as a last-ditch attempt at some kind of penance, I decided to write the whole thing out so you can see what a mean and selfish kid I really am.

So now you know.

When you live like a hermit as I do, you occasionally fall into correspondences. Since I met M via just such a correspondence, I’m always hopeful that one of them might prove interesting long term.  Today while slogging through the woods in the snow, dogs in tow, I recalled an autobiographical essay I sent to a correspondent earlier this year. It struck me, particularly in light of Emma Jane’s Christmas present, as suitable subject for a post. So, slightly adapted, here it is. I don’t think the correspondent in question actually read the whole thing in the first place, and who can blame them, it being rather long. Note to self not to overwhelm skittish correspondents with lengthy self-revelation.

In previous exegeses I have written about the growth of my tgi imagination from its unlikely beginnings in the Waspy, industrial Midwest. Besides sharing photos of my dolls, I haven’t written much about the girl I was before adolescence, a girl who bears slight relation to casey, but is far more anxious and goodie-goodie. This is her story, my story:

Despite  feeling very peculiar when reading or watching stories about tgi, I was terrified of and squicked by the reality. Part of this was a negative response to having received it in the way that I did (more on which another time). Part of it, though, has to be the gargantuan dependence on the idea of myself as a Good Girl (read: compliant, accommodating, approval-worthy, Nice). I’ve met several people into tgi who have said they didn’t misbehave while growing up. Neither did I. My parents employed a bit of light hand spanking with my brother and me for what I think of as “getting out of hand” moments. Never were there rules understood in advance, broken deliberately, and punished. The idea of deliberate punishment (whether physical or not) was enough to send me into a meltdown–because being punished would have meant that I was Bad, not Good, not me, and not lovable. I was anxious enough with my parents’ un-articulated boundaries. I was addicted at a young age to the crack of their approval. I lived in fear of losing it.

When I was six, just after joining children’s theater, I went to try outs for The Three Little Pigs. The deal at children’s theater was that our director, Mrs. R, would try a bunch of people in a bunch of roles, and you could say what your preferences were, but you had to accept whatever role you were ultimately given, with good grace. Be a Trouper. She had me try out for all the pigs and even the wolf. I was burning with shame and anxiety because I was terrified of being cast as the wolf. That would mean I was Bad. I knew I wasn’t my character, but I was young enough that I felt that their…moral state?…connected itself to me, that people would judge me as they judged the character. If I was forced to play the Big Bad Wolf, then I might not only be Bad, but it would mean I was the kind of girl who deserved to be punished, maybe even spanked! Even the first or second pigs caused me anxiety; they, too, were Bad because they lazily built their houses of inferior material. They deserved their tragedies, and worse. The third pig was the only role that would allow me to sleep at night. By massive luck, or by type casting, I got the third pig. You really cannot imagine my relief.

A little later, I was cast as a village girl in a play called The Little Juggler. It was only my third or fourth show, and I had only a few lines. We village children were mean and bratty and teased the vegetable sellers and little juggler boy. Mrs. R came up with a bit where the vegetable seller gave me a swat with a carrot after a snarky comment my character made. I froze with embarrassment, shame, confusion, horror. I almost cried during rehearsal. I was sick to my stomach for days over it and eventually was forced, through sheer desperation, to assert myself enough to talk another girl into trading lines with me. I couldn’t explain why, just that I really really really wanted to trade lines. She agreed. Later Mrs. R asked what had happened with the lines. I think I blushed beet red and near-tears blurted that we had just wanted to swap lines. She let it go, though I’d no idea why. As an adult, I now suspect she recognized one of those awkward and inexplicable childhood embarrassments, and had mercy on me.

So, spanking as a real life topic was not the slightest bit funny for me. Everyone I knew got it growing up. It was a standard punishment along with grounding and having your allowance taken away. At school there were playground games that included the “rickets” or the “spanking machine”, i.e. having to crawl through the legs of your playmates and be swatted by them as you passed. Other kids found this raucous fun. When in 3rd grade [age 8] we had “moving up day” and visited the big 4th grade classes, they played a ball game called SPUD at recess. When you lost a round, you got an S, then a P, etc. If you got up to SPUD, you had to go through the spanking machine. I felt sick to my stomach and insisted on watching only. It made me so very frightened of 4th grade.

When you misbehaved at my school, you got Sent To The Bench (which Mark hijacked in the first story he wrote for me, The Benefit of the Doubt). The Bench was a pew-like bench outside the Assistant Headmaster’s office, just inside the main entryway. Everyone could see you there. Astoundingly (or depressingly) I was never sent to the bench in all my time there, surely one of the few if only students for whom this was true. In reality, you got told off, or in middle school got a detention with the telling off. Before middle school, I had the idea that you might get spanked. Some other kids wound me up (or fanned the flames of rumor) by telling me they heard that was true. (Reality: not!)

Perhaps you are beginning to understand the little nervous wreck I was underneath that perky, A-student, nice girl in the Lilly Pultizer dresses and school uniform? She’s still here a little bit, but M (and RP) effected a lot of rehabilitation over the years (for instance, RP’s institution of Casey’s four rules).

I wore underpants at all times except when in bath or swimming costume, another habit that was whacked out of me (Casey) by RP, who forbade it under nightwear as unhygienic and perversely over-modest.

Once when I was 8 or 9, I asked my dad if French kissing was dirty. I asked it rather boldly, expecting him to 1) be impressed that I’d talk about French kissing and 2) say Right you are, it sure is. He looked at me for a second, probably surprised, and said: Of course not. It’s wonderful. I didn’t really believe him, and on some semi-conscious level thought he was giving me a party line.

I felt enormously conflicted and peculiar when my mom would read me a book called The Lonely Doll [discussed by EJ and earlier by Adele] which featured a father teddy bear taking his son across his knee, as well as  his quasi-ward, the lonely doll. It’s a terrifically twisted book–I mean, teddy bears spanking dolls?–but then a good deal of my tgi play involved my dolls spanking each other. See, I never spanked them because that would be Mean, and I wasn’t Mean, I was Nice! However, they were not all nice, and some of them were quite strict school teachers or even orphanage matrons/masters, so I was able to identify with some of my poor Holly Hobbie dolls who suffered under such wonderfully mean grown-ups. The Lonely Doll might actually be a bit of a metaphor for meeting M (if you overlook the nauseating layers of twee). Whatever her name was, this doll lived alone. Then Mr. Bear and his son came along, and she had friends. But then she and bear jr. let their hair down and played a little wild and made a mess; and Mr. Bear spanked them! She was so upset because she was sure they would leave her (because she was Bad! Not lovable!), but actually they stayed. And she wasn’t lonely, and Mr. Bear presumably dealt matter-of-factly with her and bear jr. when they misbehaved as they should like little animals exploring a wide world.

I say there is not much of this girl left in me. I say she bears only slight resemblance to casey. Is it true, though? Casey might be more willing to be naughty. She might not shatter under the shame of being punished. But she is still a recovering good girl. She is, I am. There is still work, we think, for someone to do.

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?