supplicium post mortem

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?

How did I know he loved me? I figured it from the second serious story he wrote for me, Jigsaw. I don’t believe I’ve ever shared this one; he said it was just for us. He wrote it before we met in person, sometime in July that summer. It imagined a school weekend, casey and mark with Mr. Penn, and it ended with the two of them putting the pieces together, working out that this was the real deal, life-mangling, life-restoring.

He was married. Jigsaw called the bluff on our ostensibly platonic friendship. My parents’ marriage had ended in divorce; I refused to be an Other Woman. I remember falling on my knees in my study, sobbing and imploring God to help, somehow. I was not religious at this point, so this impulse was as spontaneous as it was extraordinary. Here I was—here we were—being vivisected by this love, yet I did not want to help destroy anyone’s marriage. I had no idea what the near or distant future held, I only knew it was utterly insane to feel as though my entire existence—all 26 years of it—had been permanently rearranged by this Englishman I had never met face-to-face.

I remember the calm that came over me, not lessening the acute emotion, but muting it for a moment, and I remember the irrational certainty, like a rumbling in my stomach, that if I merely sat back and waited, doing nothing, all would be well, and all would be well, and all manner of means would be well…

Arrgh…again, not quite fiction. And a topic that deserves much more thorough dealing. Half-way through writing it, I wanted to delete it and start again. However, I have this…attitude?…philosophy? that once something starts to write itself, one really ought not to give up on it, or censure it. In a way, those are the rules. I’m not sure I would stick with them in all circumstances, but I did today. Forgive any flippancy this 250-word treatment suggests. And please, if you can, refrain from drawing conclusions about me. I was, at that time, astoundingly naive.

What is Flash Fiction Friday?
Read the other folks writing this week:

• Marie - welcome!
• Graham
• Rafi
• Mija - welcome also!!
• PapaTomLA

Today I had an early-morning encounter with a prototypical Dude (as previously discussed), but I remain stunned, somehow, by the astonishing waste of space this Dude was, by his utter squandering of manhood. Take as read the fact that narrow encounters do not summarize the whole person. Yadda yadda. Long story short, this guy was a douchebag.

It is 8 AM and I am at the corner park with the dogs. This is one of those miniscule urban spaces here in Gotham where you are allowed to have your dog off leash before 9 AM and after 9 PM. My dogs get along fine with others. They’re friendly, but they tend to do their own thing. One of my dogs, the Corgi, is crazy about ball. We stop at this parklette so he can get 10-15 minutes of solid ball fetching (“Quidditch practice”). This morning after three throws, a Bull Terrier takes the ball. Bummer! Since Corgi will fight for the snitch if necessary, I keep him away from Bull Terrier while its owner goes to get the ball back.

kinda like Dude, but these dudes bathe & trim their beardings * "Let's twitpic our dick pics."

BT’s dad was a Dude: 20-something, ungroomed-bearded, slobbily dressed in an I’m-too-ironic-to-try way, mellow, and sporting some kind of dog-treat fanny pack. Dude wanders in the direction of BT, but he’s not chasing BT, presumably because he knows BT will only treat such movement as a game of chase. So Dude keeps circling BT at a distance. Time passes.

Five minutes.

Ten minutes.

I realize we will not be able to play Quidditch at all even when we retrieve the ball.

More time passes.

I start cutting off BT’s escape routes, but Dude does not close in. I signal polite impatience by leashing up my dogs in preparation for departure. Dude still does not have BT in hand. Now, you may say I should have blown it off and left the ball there, but this is a really good ball. It is orange and rubber and fits in the flinger and costs more than $6. No way was I sacrificing the good ball to Dude and BT!

Finally, I capture BT, but although I am a fearless dog-dom, I didn’t fancy putting my hand into the jaws of an unfamiliar Bull Terrier. I stick my hand into the mouth of any dog I know, but I’m not an idiot. I let Dude extract the ball.

Dude tugs gently on the ball, but BT will not relinquish. Dude, rather than opening the dog’s jaws, keeps gently tugging, all the while telling the dog to “leave it.” I would call his command a gentle suggestion—you know, only if you feel like it, buddy. Clearly Dude has been to obedience class; he has the vocabulary. But despite the fact that Dude considers himself a real-deal pack leader, the type who watches The Dog Whisperer and thinks, I got that; despite this, the Bull Terrier is the undisputed leader of this pack. And BT declines to Leave the ball, even when Dude tries to push treats in its mouth. Minutes are ticking by as I stand there watching Dude repeat his flaccid command, Leave it. Eventually, Dude gets up the energy to touch his dog’s jaw and loosen its grip on our ball. Ball is free! We depart. Corgi is pissed.

And I am pissed. Yes, Dude ruined Quidditch practice, but it was more the principle of the thing. And the principle is this: how can you walk around like an adult man and act like such a weenie? Had he, in fact, already undergone surgical castration? But even this suggestion is an insult to women worldwide, for I would expect any female dog owner to be able to get a ball off her own dog faster than that. My dogs (corgi or wolfhound) would not dream of messing me about like that. We understand each other. If they misbehave, spankings get doshed out, and then we understand each other again. (I am not a dog abuser, before you get your knickers in a twist. I never hurt them. I do make my point in non-verbal terms.) But back to Dude. Dude thought that repeating a command over and over and over in a dull-as-dishwater voice, like a nagging parent, was the same thing as being a pack leader. Dude also appeared to think personal hygiene and grooming (of himself, not the dog) was for yuppies. Dude’s jeans sagged in the back—not gangsta style, but I’m-too-fucking-lazy-to-stay-up style—revealing a bit of graying underwear. And Dude’s graying underwear was brief-material, not boxer-material. There was something terrfically unwashed and limp about it all.

And while we are on the topic, let’s talk about men’s underpants. I am not actually a big fan of boxers. They aren’t gross, but they don’t do it for me. They make me think of the preppy guys I grew up with, like Kirk, who in drunken idiocy dropped his pants at the dinner table during Junior Assembly in eleventh grade, revealing plaid boxers. I actually fancy classic y-front briefs, or boxer briefs. But fancying them is a different thing entirely from wanting to see them poking out from some Dude’s unkempt jeans at the dog park! What I really cannot abide in men’s underwear is the Euro-panties, you know, those briefs men wear in Europe without a slit? They look just like girl’s knickers but in boy colors. I mean, if you’re going to wear that, you might as well cross-dress entirely. Maybe I would change my mind if confronted with a hunk of hot Italian masculinity wearing said undergarments, but until that time, we say nyet on Euro-panties.

But back to Dude. What, I wondered all morning, does he imagine he is doing with his life? Does he have any idea what a weenie he is? ** Where—tell me please!—are the real men?! I know you exist, guys, but apparently not in hipsterville. Please, please, gentlemen, can you not come and kick the rear ends of these douchebags and recover masculinity for the human race? If you don’t, we are done for.

*for more pics from hipsterville check out Look at this fucking hipster.

**OK, I know I am a bitch. Let’s take that as read, too.

The dreams don’t stop. Neither does the hope that he’ll be upstairs when I come in the door, that I’ll hear his footsteps clumping along the floorboards and down the spiral stairs. It will be such a relief, as it always is when he comes home. Like stepping into air conditioning from a brutal, New York summer.

People don’t talk about him as much as they used to. Everyone else seems to have repaired the colossal tear in the matrix that his disappearance caused. His job has been filled. It is no longer tasteful to think on him.

I cannot tell you… I cannot tell you—anything. I know…I know. Everyone has part of their life which is now in the past. I am no different from any single person still walking this planet. I don’t like the word unfair. But how come I have to keep living when he didn’t?

The card I gave him on our last anniversary is still in the bedside drawer that used to be his, its message a kind of steganography:

xoxoxo me

h&l&nt & tc4mh, l&h ohbb uhc, h-h, & ont4cdm b/c sagg.

I asked him if he understood, and he read the whole thing confidently aloud: hugs and love and nice things, and the cane for marky, long and hard on his bare bottom, ha-ha, and only nice things for casey because she’s a good girl.

There is no one to talk to this way anymore. Even the dogs don’t get it.

God, help me.

This really was a bumper crop for 3F. Don’t know if it is fall industriousness or the thrill of a hard challenge, but these writers deserve a big hand (won’t say what kind or where) or at the very least nice comments on their blogs. Read on, Macduff!

• Rafi
• Sandy
• Abby
• Nettagyrl
• PapaTomLA