supplicium post mortem

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

It’s been a grueling week. First, a close colleague of M’s died suddenly and young, like M did. Same church, same requiem mass, even the same weather. So, last Friday I re-lived my husband’s funeral.

Then, my family came to town for my birthday. I love them. I’m hugely grateful for them and for the way they show up for me. But it all just made me want M and miss him even more. I have so many wonderful friends and kind, loving people in my life, yet I don’t feel any more attached to life than I did a year ago, for the most part.

The sermon on my birthday spoke of many things, but the one that struck me was the Rector’s exegesis on Take up your cross and follow me. Crucifixion is no longer a form of capital punishment, he declared. So what, he asked, is this cross? His answer: the cross is this mortal flesh, this mortal life. We are none of us getting out of this world alive, he said. And yet we are tasked with taking up this mortal life and living it, fully, faithfully, despite every attendant suffering. I want to do that. I want to be capable of doing that. I am always comforted and somehow excited—is that the word?—by the emphasis, at least at my church, that this life we are given is fundamentally and indispensably physical. We are not designed as ethereal, purely spiritual or purely mental beings. (Natty wrote a moving and theologically astute post about this a while back.) So on my forty-first birthday, I heard this instruction: take up your cross, your humanity, your mortality, your body, your sexuality, and your broken, empty, amputated heart, take it all up and follow me. I have ears to hear, at least.

In other news, my father was in a reminiscing mood, and for part of the weekend I was treated to stories of his wild 1950s boarding school days, when he would go with his roommate—Holden-Caulfield-like—down to Greenwich Village on the weekends, stay out all night hearing Beat poets and jazz singers, then repair back to the roommate’s family home in New England to sleep it off before returning to the dorm Sunday night. Needless to say, folks back in the industrial Midwest had no clue about his exploits, nor could they have understood them, probably.

Then today I hear from my brother that Dad had been reminiscing an entirely different chapter to my sister. This chapter plainly titillated and appalled the siblings, the gist of it being that my maternal grandmother apparently gave herself daily enemas for most of her adult life. The revelation that prim-and-proper grandma was perhaps a closet klismaphiliac caused quite a stir amongst my un-kinky sibs. I asked, bulb or bag? Bro didn’t really know the difference. They looked things up on the internet. I’m thinking, Yeah, I know that site but there are better ones I’d recommend…

And if that wasn’t enough, apparently grandma also gave enemas to her children (ahem, our mom) at times, and our late aunt was supposed to have done some paintings on the subject, including one of grandma self-administering. I’m thinking, Where the hell are these paintings?! but I say, That might be too much information, lucky they’re lost. Sis informs us that the DSM has Things To Say about giving children enemas. It can be a form of sexual abuse, she says. Anal violation. One track of my 8-track mind is thinking, Anal violation? Yes, please! Track 2 is thinking: What a big fucking deal social workers make of a simple home remedy. Track 3: Oh, bless grandma. That’s where I get it from. Track 4: You guys had better not look too far into the bathroom cupboards upstairs. Track 5: Maybe the DSM is right because it’s fucking hot. Track 6: Oh, but it can also be very calming, I can attest. Track 7: Have either of you ever had anything in your ass? Track 8: You really do not know me at all, do you?

My interest in That Thing was adult onset. It was not employed in our house, except once (not to me) on doctor’s orders. I had scarcely heard of it in those years when my mind was glomming onto spanking and then to English schoolboys getting the cane. I must have been corrupted when I found the internet; on second thought, I think it could have been Anne Rice’s Beauty series. I believe that series is also what introduced me to the idea of anal play generally. I’m glad she didn’t return to the church before she finished writing those. Not—NB!—that a return to the church should necessarily preclude writing such awesome erotica, but in her case, I think it probably would have.

I am dying to know more about my grandmother. How did she self-administer That Thing? Was it really every day? Why? Did she enjoy it? How much did she take? What started her out? Unfortunately, I think it would be way too embarrassing for me to ask either of my parents for elaboration. I do know from my grandmother’s diaries (which I possess) that she had a very sensitive digestion and often had trouble eating. If she was having That Thing daily, though, I’m not surprised. That can’t be good for you. I do wonder if there is a genetic component, though. I am positive that there is one for spanking. Anyway, amazing what you can hear if you listen when family are feeling loquacious.

Sometimes people are listening, and hearing, more than you imagine. A week or so ago I had a cookout for some friends from church who had known M well. They are very kind, but I can’t say I know them that well outside church. Then yesterday, at the end of a highly frustrating and quite emotional day, I got around to sifting through the mail, which I typically find oppressive, and found a card from one of the people who’d been to my house. It was a very beautiful handmade thing and inside was a piece of paper with this poem on it:

Wait

Wait, for now.
Distrust everything, if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven’t they
carried you everywhere, up to now?
Personal events will become interesting again.
Hair will become interesting.
Pain will become interesting.
Buds that open out of season will become lovely again.
Second-hand gloves will become lovely again,
their memories are what give them
the need for other hands. And the desolation
of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness
carved out of such tiny beings as we are
asks to be filled; the need
for the new love is faithfulness to the old.

Wait.
Don’t go too early.
You’re tired. But everyone’s tired.
But no one is tired enough.
Only wait a while and listen.
Music of hair,
Music of pain,
music of looms weaving all our loves again.
Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,
most of all to hear,
the flute of your whole existence,
rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.

– Galway Kinnell

I’ve never heard of this poet or read this poem, but as you can imagine I was in tears, not merely because it is a moving poem, but from the surprise of it arriving as and when it did. And I realized the sender had seen me more truly than I recognized, or perhaps saw the love that still lingers in this house, and then through an act of compassion came to feel with me. The card said nothing more than xxooxx + a signature. I do pray everyday for help, big help. Sometimes it comes, and turns out to have been on its way for some time.

Hair will become interesting. Pain will become interesting. Their memories are what give them the need for other hands…

Those of you who follow me on Twitter will be sick to the back teeth by now of hearing about the great bookcase cleaning-and-reorganization of 2009. I was so physically exhausted yesterday that my legs and arms were trembling. Some of this was the exertion of assembling, moving, and improvisationally securing to wall of the newest overflow bookcase. But otherwise it was a day filled with lifting, reaching, humping, etc. The rule for the day was to finish everything I started, on the spot. I have a deep-seated habit of leaving things almost-done. I’m trying to retrain myself.

I never listen to the radio except in the car, but yesterday I put on WCBS FM and was treated to great music from “the sixties, seventies, and eighties.” The music plus the work took me back to all the move-packing I did in high-school and college, as well as memories of moving into my current home at age 24. I made myself throw away M’s scratched plastic sunglasses (which resided on the bookcase), and this only enhanced the sensation of living some past identity. I really do not want to go back to my 20′s, to that person whose “family” was my mom, brother & sister, dad & stepmother. You could not pay me enough money to relive ages 15-25. Yet here I am, as aimless as I was then, but with more responsibilities. Actually, I had more aim then. I was going to be a famous theater director. Then I was going to be a famous writer. The fact that these are no longer my aims does not translate to failure in my mind, but success – in escaping the grip of my childhood worship of Accomplishment. Today what I want is the Real Deal in my personal life, a family of my own, a vibrant spiritual life, and the space and permission to write all the books that are in me. To be honest, I wouldn’t mind being a famous writer, but the best kind of famous for me would be 1) making sufficient money from it; 2) being known and respected enough to be asked to read and speak places; 3) being known and respected enough not to have to shop my  projects around. I would not want to be famous like, say, Neil Gaimon and have a frantic, celebrity life that required an assistant. I would never want to be famous enough to have the media pry into my personal life.

The bookcase reorg. project had begun months ago, but yesterday I woke up to find that TL had written on the board, “Wednesday is Procrastination Busting Day.” Oh, brother. To hear her tell it, if you quit procrastinating, things take a lot less time than you feared. In reality, the bookcases took a lot longer than I feared, which – Newsflash TL! – is why I procrastinate in the first place. But here’s the kicker: I’m in the shower at 9.30 pm after 13 hours of work, hardly able to stand up (pity party!), and there’s this voice saying, Ok but you still haven’t made any progress with the book project (a typesetting job that has nothing to do with the bookcase reorg). And as much as cdm would like to whine and say this voice belongs to TL, it really doesn’t. In reality TL was saying: Well done, Casey. Things look great. You worked so hard today and I’m very impressed with your determination. Ice-cream tomorrow! Casey did not hear this, however. Casey only heard: You’re still not doing enough. It was this same, sinister voice, I suspect, that panicked us as we tried to fall asleep with worries about what on earth we will do when one day we have to pack up this whole house and move somewhere else.

RP and M were onto this demon, and managed Casey with it in mind. Hence rules #2 and #3. Casey’s four rules, by the way:

1. Be honest about feelings and needs.
2. Be kind to yourself.
3. Do what you want, not what you should.
4. Ask other people what they feel, don’t decide things for them.

Yesterday, I was capable of identifying that demon, intellectually rejecting the way it wanted to poison a day’s hard work, but I wasn’t able to dispute with it vigorously, as RP could. I had no sword, no chariot, no bow. I had no one valiant on my side.

I did come across some very old dockets. I think these were something M produced before we got the docket book. They date from the first autumn of his residence here in Gotham, my first as a full-time teacher. What they were doing tucked away in the memoir of a neurosurgeon, I have no idea. Seeing his handwriting, even only his initials, is worse even than seeing his photograph. Why should his writing persist when he can’t? Clearly, I am nowhere near being ready to tackle the Basement Reorg. or the Man-closet Cleanout.

The last docket appears to have been issued by a choleric and muddled member of staff at St. Mary’s. Click to see the back. I don’t remember the story behind this one, but I think RP ended the escalating drama by informing Casey he’d called Miss K, sorted her out, and would now be sorting Casey out, ha ha. I like his little “as discussed” on the back.  November 6, 1996 looks to have been a train-wreck of a day. Eventually, RP stopped biting at things like a pile of dockets and just did what was required to stop the downward spiral. Sigh.

I had poster’s remorse as soon as I clicked Publish last night. A murder of worries descended: in clearing up my nationality, have I become less appealing? Less mysterious? Less interesting? Or, more to the point, less authentic?

My father, a son of the industrial mid-west, has always been scathing about posers. You should hear him excoriate his cousin (my “aunt”), who raised her children in the UK and whom he accuses of being “a big phony” and “more British than the British.” By confessing my American upbringing, have I made it impossible for people to read my UK-set pieces without thinking, faker?

The subject for today’s exegesis (Quick! Click away!): How to regard being drawn to an alien thing that on some level you feel you are? In this case, let us speak of the English schoolboy. To persist with writing them would appear to be monstrously inauthentic. How dare an American girl pretend to know them? Yet, they have been with me more than half my life.

Cue timeline of my tgi imagination: Little House on the Prairie (which debuted when I was 5), followed by the Orphanage (after seeing Annie at age 9), eventually succeeded by the English boys’ school (zapped whilst watching Stalky & Co. at age 16). There were of course other influences, then and now, but the imagination has moved on little since eleventh grade.

David Parfitt & Robert Addie as Beetle & Stalky

Cue, perhaps, digression into the idle coveting of my brother’s willy, on the grounds that it would be so much less effort to wank with it. This was before Judy Blume or whoever informed me of erections. Before I blundered onto English schoolboys (perhaps not incidentally after achieving my driver’s license – “You’re becoming a tiger!” my driver’s ed teacher exclaimed with relief after weeks of me driving like an agoraphobic mouse), before that moment of gazing, slack-jawed at Robert Addie on A&E, I disliked boys as a category. Boys were bad, noisy, dirty, perverted, insensitive, got into big trouble deservedly, and made life a lot less nice when they were around. (Note: crushes, and boys with whom I was momentarily “going”, though not kissing, were excluded from this estimation.) Boys, in short, scared me, especially their sexuality, though I couldn’t have put my finger on that. I did know, in high school, that boys only wanted one thing, and on some level I thought that if I kissed a boy, that meant I was agreeing to sex. My junior year in college, on the eve of my first kiss, I asked my wild roommate if that was true. She said, Of course not! but I didn’t quite believe her. Later, having discovered a.s.s. but not yet M, I assumed that letting a man spank me was tantamount to saying, You may fuck me, or at least grope me. What a relief to learn that this need not be so. Of course, back then my mind labored to Discover the Rules, rather than to articulate my own boundaries. Sigh.

FYI for you, the first days I spent with M on his first visit to Gotham did involve kissing and a few other activities that would have shocked my teenage self (though not fucking); however, this did not mix with tgi. M and I may have made out on the futon, but Marky and Mr. Prior were scrupulously chaste. I got all those bruises with only 12 strokes of the cane through Calvin Klein boxer briefs and school trousers. RP only touched Casey to pull the tail of her shirt out of her trousers (a purely dramatic gesture, as it makes zero difference re. padding), and to shake her hand afterwards. I don’t think they were even on hugging terms then.

M did later introduce me to the workings of the male anatomy, and to a delight in dirty English schoolboys. His was an unrepressed, joyful sexuality. Sex was Fun and Nice, a Nice Thing. He loved his willy, and if other people wanted to look at it, it was no surprise to him. This, you might imagine, was alluring and foreign to my mind.

This mind – to insert yet more exegesis – had by age 26 become so thoroughly warped by the toxic combination of WASP prudery and Ivy League feminism that it had imprisoned me in a complacent academic aloofness guarded by sheer unconscious terror. (See Equity Day Off, the dialogue with Judy, ha ha). My party line was that I was All For Sex, any sex (so long as it was Safe); in all likelihood, I thought, I was even bisexual. Sex was No Big Deal; it was a choice, a creative expression of my most actualized personhood. I liked wanking, therefore I must want wild sex, like my friends and fellow peer-counselors in college. This particular peer counseling group was for sexual concerns. We did all-night shifts manning a phone line where people would call to ask about condoms, or to chat through the dilemma of having a crush on their roommate. We led them through being Straight, Gay, Bi, or Questioning. If I had gone to school a little later, the whole universe of Queer would have necessitated a longer training course, ha ha.

McTurk, Stalky, & Beetle

The point is I talked a good talk, but – gosh – I just couldn’t manage to get any guys to like me as anything other than a friend. Maybe you’re starting to get the picture. The narrator in Equity Day Off is a pretty accurate portrait, except that I never in college got anywhere near to admitting my real interests. My obsession with England was, at best, picturesque and Anglophile. My obsession with English schoolboys (being them, loving them) was too puzzling and unnerving to contemplate with my full mind. Hence Gender Politics, Feminist Theater, Cultural Discourse, blah fucking blah.

After spending a lot of time in England (biking, hiking, writing for a travel book), some of the attraction became clearer. There was a way that English people’s neuroses were like my own. I understood them instinctively in a way I didn’t understand Americans back home. It was like discovering a whole life I’d forgotten about through amnesia.

It would take a book, or more, to trace my love and hate affair with England (+ Scotland, Wales, Ireland). And the thing with being married is that to a certain extent you become merged with your spouse. Not just in sexual intercourse, or in name (actually I kept my surname), but in vocabulary, habit, and so many, many things. So, in ways intrinsic and extrinsic to that marriage, I have absorbed many things English, words being only part of it. Certain pronunciations, for instance, send shudders down my spine: our pronounced are rather than hour; wrath with a flat, twangy a vs. a deeper sound rhyming with Roth. Also, arse pronounced properly (soft r) turns me on like no tomorrow, whereas ass leaves me ice-cold. FYI for anyone attempting to talk dirty to me, ha ha.

All this exegesis and still, perhaps, I come off as an Anglophile fraud. Know that I am no Anglophile. I  detest the English on many grounds. I possess no twee, cultish fascination with tea and scones and things that are “so British.” Ugh.

What, then? Is it an attachment to the home of the English Vice? And overdose of strong literature at an impressionable age? The lingering effects of marriage? Or is it in some fashion the English schoolboy stowaway in me, recognizing scents of home when the sea winds blow that way?

She just plays one on tv. LOL.

A couple of people have asked recently, whether I’m of British extraction, and while that’s almost as flattering as having people think I’m a boy, I won’t fib.

I was born & raised in the mid-western USA. Thankfully, I don’t talk like that any more. Also thankfully, I don’t talk in a Gotham accent. And unless I’m in Englandland trying to blend in somewhere, I don’t talk in any of their accents either.

I was married to an Englishman. Certainly that had a big impact on my imagination and ideolect, but less than you might think. The schoolboys, for instance, already existed when I met him.

I do write in that world in my regular life, so I guess it has developed over time. I don’t know if it’s got much to do with skill, though. These people just appear, and I listen to them. So thanks, people, for appearing.

I miss his voice, by the way. His accent had softened drastically since moving here, but – God – I would give anything to hear him talk to me now, to hear him whisper the things he used to whisper in the dark. Or in the light. I miss his expressions, and the way he was always making up new ones. I miss his often manic playing with words. I miss the language jokes we had. I miss all the jokes. I miss the ways he said Casey: “Case-ey.” “Casey!” “cdm-cdm-cdm.” I miss the way he said my real name. I miss how he called me Sweetheart. How, when I said, “It’s me,” he said, “Hello, me.” I miss his whistling. I miss his snoring. I miss what he’d say when he came through the door. I miss what he said in our first phone call: “You need a lot of looking after…”

Miss Lincoln is in one of her moods. I call it The Procrastination Buster. Hold on tight, kids, this is going to hurt.

One thing you should know about Miss Lincoln if you don’t already is that she loves to see people busy. Marky used to make jokes about running and hiding when she got out her clipboard and colored pencils, but IT’S NO JOKE! You can prolly guess that she hasn’t been happy with my “progress” this summer, meaning, I guess, stuff I’ve got done. The thing she’s really mad about is how I’m making practically no progress on my summer book project. But, this is because 1) life’s too sad! and 2) I’ve got too much else to do!!

She’s been grumbling for a while now about “dealing with” my “procrastination.” OK, first, like I keep telling her, I’m not avoiding stuff, I just haven’t got to it yet. Second, she never deals with anything the way she and RP used to deal with things. She Moans at you, and Looks at you, and Talks to you, and then she gets all energetic and Makes You Do Stuff, lots of stuff, all at once.

Take today. We had to Get Up At A Reasonable Hour (read “before 6:30″) so there was time to do writing before taking the dogs to the park and being ready for the cable man to come at 8. Then, when he was here, in addition to me helping him and keeping the dog from attacking him and putting the air-conditioner back together after him, TL decides this is the day to bottle and re-brew the kombucha. She says I have to because it’s my project and my idea. This also entails making another fruit-fly trap. Later on there’s a transatlantic call booked, and then there’s three hours of lessons. Then it’s walk the dogs again.

before

But this is still not enough, oh no, because it’s only 6.00 and there’s hours of productivity left in the day. So TL decides it’s also the day to make the sourdough bread, which she also makes me do because I’m the one who’s in charge of the sourdough starter. And then, at 7.00, she makes me go out in the yard like some kind of orphan girl and start weeding the jungle that used to be the garden, and she doesn’t let me come in until it’s dark, and even then she tells me I have to finish it in the morning.

after

No sooner do I step in the door than she makes me strip and get in the shower and wash and scrub with a brush and all that. I asked her what the point was since I’d just get dirty again in the morning. She said I should watch my tone if I wanted internet time tonight. So I shut up.

around the tomatoes

So now it’s 8.30 and me & the dogs are just getting dinner and to top it all off she remarks, in an oh-yeah kind of way, that she sees I still haven’t made any more progress on the book project. And don’t get me started on her theory about why the garden turned into a jungle in the first place. Hint: not because of all the rain! You can never please GUs!!

I miss Marky. It’s not fair having to do chores by yourself. I don’t want my procrastination busted by TL. I hate her. I hate her even more because she’s not mean like she used to be, but she’s mean in a whole new, modern, long-suffering stupid way. Boo, double boo, ten thousand boo. And poor me while we’re at it.

p.s. I’m making chocolate chip cookies and I don’t care what she sez!!
p.p.s. When I showed her where my hands got all cut up in the garden, she sez: “I told you to wear gloves.” And NOW she’s making me take out the trash. BOO!!!

This has been a ropey weekend full of too much of my mother, too much nausea-inducing grief, and the strong desire to be dead. The weather has been made-to-order, cool, sunny, dry, lush. I brought the dogs up to my mom’s house (a.k.a. the house with the pink “whack me” pyjamas) and there was plenty of activity: attending a neighbor’s cookout (tiresome), buying plants and pots at 50% off (awesome), cooking (e.g. blueberry cobbler), watching stuff (Le Tour, Wimbledon, Johnny Depp’s Dillinger flick), hiking with the dogs (once getting lost and having to bushwhack), taking her wicked poodle out on the bike, trimming back her wisteria, and generally being fussed over and over-controlled by her.

Also, as she told me the story of her elderly friend who told the hospital their diagnosis wasn’t good enough and thus eventually got life-saving treatment for her husband, I spiralled off into a silent panicked freak-out. Because when they told me M was dead, I just stood there, trembling. I did not scream and raise the roof and say “That’s not good enough,” and demand to see their superiors and threaten to sue and insist they go back in there and revive him or transfer him somewhere that would. All this, I realized, he would have done for me. I did ask them if they were sure he was really dead, since he was still warm, but they told me yes, they were very sure, and I accepted this. He would have raised even Hell to bring me back, but I meekly accepted what I was told. Did I do this because I always suspected deep down that happiness wasn’t mine, that a huge tragedy would smite me because it always does when things are good? If I had known then what killed him (aortic aneurysm), I would have screamed and yelled and threatened and made their existence a misery until they sucked the blood out of the sac around his heart, put him on life support, and got someone in to fix it. Now, though, I can’t do this. I can never ever do this as long as I live. His body is ashes in the columbarium, and nothing can bring him back. I failed to stop the permanent ruination of his life and my own. And thus I want to go buy a bunch of sleeping pills and eat them. Really.

I am not doing this, however, because I believe it’s a sin, perhaps the only sin I’m unwilling to commit. And by sin I mean an active, willful rejection of and separation from God. So, to my atheist friends who silently wish I would get over my God delusion, know that God is the only reason I have not killed myself.

Today I drove by the house we were thinking of buying when he died last year. Someone else owns it now. We don’t. We aren’t raising our first child there. All the good things we were working to make happen are off the menu, for us, for me.

I’ve been reaching out a little bit to people in the tgi world (otherwise known as “The Scene”). I’m planning to go to the SSNY party next weekend, which will be the first event I’ve attended (save a brunch, with M, about ten years ago, hosted by a different organization). So, if you are going to the same party, find me and say hi! By all accounts, this is a nice group of people whose focus is old-fashioned spanking, which is pretty much my style. Reading Radagast’s recent posts about the nuances of communication with people in the scene (here and here) awakened all my social anxieties and insecurities. I think that at heart I believe that no-one decent would ever find me appealing and want to play with me. Certainly the only person who could ever love me is dead.

I’m sorry—I really am—for all of the depressing self-pity in this blog. I try to hold most of it in. I am certain it is unappealing to read. I wouldn’t want to read it. However, maybe there is someone who finds, or will find it helpful, for some reason. They say widowhood is the club you never wanted to join. I was not supposed to be this person. But since I am, friends (I can call you friends, can’t I, if you’ve read this far?), this is my dispatch from the edge. You don’t need to come here yourselves. I’ll tell you everything you need to know. And what you need to know is this: Love your people while you have them. Love them. Love them. Nothing else matters very much.