supplicium post mortem

I feel despair, more than sometimes, at the prospect of ever finding a second husband. One thing that makes it seem even more hopeless is contemplating how non-overlapping certain aspects of my character are. This venn diagram shows what I mean (not to scale):

This doesn’t take into account the many other factors that make someone’s sensibility, humor, heart, intellect, habits, playfulness and imagination compatible with mine, let alone age, availability, location, etc. You can be friends with plenty of people who don’t share your politics, religion, and/or sexuality, but can you marry them? For me at least, I think there has to be a lot of overlap.

Eliane’s post on non-spanking punishments got me thinking, so I headed over to graphjam to essay my own version. (If anyone knows of a better way to do graphs with non-numerical y-axis values, please let me know, as there are irritating limits with graphjam.) Of course, there are more penalties than could fit on this graph, so think of this as graph #1. A conspicuous omission is Eliane’s hated lines. I quite like lines myself, as long as I’m not sent away to do them by myself. This connects to the reason behind the low “reality” hotness value for corner time, i.e. that when under punishment I respond better when a closeness is maintained between me and whoever is giving it. In reality, the times I’ve been made to stand in the corner have left me either alienated or actually bereft. So, one of those nice-in-theory, bad-in-practice things for cdm. RP would have more insight into all this, but he’s dead.

This afternoon we went on an outing to the Met, and to get there we walked through the park. (That would be the royal we of me, Casey and TL.) It was a warm, sunny gorgeous early-summer day. The park was full of tourists, school groups, and toddlers with nannies or moms. We walked up the east side of the park to the museum, which happened to take us through the route we used to take in the old days when we would take the dogs there early on Sunday mornings.

Pretty soon I was crying too much and had to sit down on a bench. I was not only longing for M, but also imagining him walking down the path towards me wearing baseball cap, navy blue chinos, white dress shirt rolled up to the elbows, black Church’s shoes, and then kissing me, putting his arm around me, having on his left hand his wedding ring (now on my right hand) and signet ring, being – oh, forget it.

And I felt literally demented because:

1. The periods of my life don’t feel joined up anymore; the past feels like a dream, and I can’t be entirely sure if it was as real as the people and characters in my mind, or less real.
2. I don’t seem capable of touching the outside world a lot of the time. Sitting on the park bench crying underneath my sunglasses, I felt like a visitor from another dimension: I could see all the passersby, but they couldn’t see me.
3. I was wandering (literally) around this city all by myself and without a plan, not knowing what was driving me from moment to moment. How did I even wind up at the museum today?

In fact, I was wandering around in a type of magical thinking fog, imagining I would encounter someone – him, the new person for my life, someone like M but alive and different in a way I can’t envision. The guys I look at are too young for me. I’m looking for someone in his 40s, but my eye notices guys who must be in their 20s. That’s the age I was the last time I looked. Note to self: we are no longer 26.

I did an experiment today and took my wedding ring off my left hand and put it on my right hand, next to where I wear M’s ring. I was curious if it would make any men notice me. Up to now I would say I seem to have on an invisibility cloak which renders me non-existent to anyone but kindly old ladies at church and girl friends. The ring experiment, in case you’re wondering, yielded nothing. But then, I have never been the kind of girl men go for. I’m reasonably pretty (if a bit overweight), sane (relatively speaking), solvent (for the moment), smart, full of heart, playful, churchgoing and devout, deeply kinky, imaginative, possessing of a cool apartment, two awesome dogs, a decent family, and a history of one relationship – a real marriage. Except for the fact that I’m 40 and not 22, the fact that I don’t have a model’s body, and the fact that I want more than anything to have my husband back and need to be drawn into this world again, except for that – I think I’m a good catch.

Where is the angler, out on an early summer fishing trip, kipping off school, lazy narcoleptic English summer by the river, stealing back before tea and evensong, summoned to the library before bed, falling asleep sore, sun-burnt, tired, and quite happy – except for the fact that he hasn’t had his life disturbed by me yet, hasn’t had his heart enlarged by me, his mind bent around my me, his world made infinitely bigger, better, more irritating, and all manner of means well by me? And so he, too, longs somewhere inside himself.

During Holy Week I had two big dreams about M both set in a garden. The second one (between Maundy Thursday and Good Friday) was set in my childhood bedroom, and there M had made me a garden. He wasn’t there any longer, but he had put a square of top soil – rich black soil – over the pink carpet, and in it planted blooming bulbs, hyacinth, daffodils, tulips. I was overwhelmed by its beauty and thought that only he could make something that beautiful. The idea was: I could sit in this garden next to the window in the rocking chair and think or read or write. This window is the one out of which I would stick my head, as a child, and long – for something I couldn’t name. I would long for my imagination to be real. I would smell the air and imagine it was a good night for running away from the orphanage to the wide world. I had a perfectly fine real life – great mom, dad, brother, sister, everything you’d want – yet I longed for an inchoate tgi world, something beyond myself. So M made me a garden to sit in by this window of longing.

Do other people long as I did as a child, and as I do again now? I imagine other people, men in particular, do not really long, but get on with their busy lives, distracted or occupied by cell phones, friends, messages, games, work, and – by age 40 – life and its many responsibilities. Is there someone at a window of his own – have been whacked, having wanked, satisfied and secure and yet perhaps not – longing, too, for some inchoate tgi world, his life not yet disrupted and dazzled by me?

3AM

The carbon monoxide detector just woke me the frack up because its battery is low. Those things are so fracking piercingly loud.

I was in the middle of a dream about accidentally outing myself to my family. In the dream, my RW father was here at the apartment (along with some other person or people). We were getting ready to go out for dinner or something, and he said that he’d meet me in the garage? Vestibule? Hall? On the way out, and there we’d discuss what had been happening (something I’d done that I shouldn’t?). He said discuss like RP, M et al used to say it, with a capital D. Except his wasn’t exactly capital, sort of a half-capital. I felt a flutter of panic and also a little excitement. The excitement (that he was maybe going to deal with casey) just outweighed the panic (that he knew about casey and tgi). Then, a minute later, he said basically we’d go to dinner after he’d given me my spanking, because then the air would be cleared and we could actually enjoy our food. Take previous emotions and ratchet them up about a thousand, with the panic part gaining ground.

We never got to a literal tgi confrontation, but later he, my sister, and I were more or less discussing it, and I was saying how I’d told her [not true RW!], but I hadn’t thought he’d find out. He was hurt and annoyed that I hadn’t told him, which he considered tantamount to lying to him. [RW he'd never think this! If he did find out, my guess is he'd just never mention it to me. Remind me to tell you about how I originally found a.s.s in 1995...] I was torn between feeling relieved and feeling that freak-out feeling that he knew; plus, who else knew?

Later, the person I’d told changed from my sister into my friend who I actually have told. [a writing friend I told in extremis of grief, a couple of days after M died, when I had zero filters and cared nothing for anything, including my own mortal life. This friend was actually unfazed (or seemed to be), bless her. Recently, when I confessed to blogging about tgi, she professed herself un-shocked and claimed that once her kids were in school she'd be "getting her phreak on" too. I think the waiting until they are in school is due to the fact that she's too fatally exhausted right now to get anything on.] So this friend was telling me the whole situation wasn’t a big deal.

Also in the dream (here’s the too much internets), I was twittering with tgi acquaintances, like Natty, Barrister, and Mija (whose tweets from the Shadow Lane event in Vegas I liked a lot), and there was a feature where you 1) shared del.ici.ous bookmarks and 2) had the equivalent of twitter wordwars, tweeting real time in teams about whatever topic you wanted and seeing which team could post the most words in a set time. I was trying to get the  hang of it all.

I must be really far gone if I dreamed my real father had decided to deal with casey and I wasn’t even squicked by it. Traditionally, when I dream that someone in my family knows about tgi, I’m freaked out and the dream takes on the quality of panicked nightmare. This time, it was only a little uncomfortable. Must be the effects of too much blogsphere and worrying about compromising myself with online exposure. But also, as I said, an unappealing sign of desperation. I really am tired of myself, and I don’t need a cranky carbon monoxide detector to show me that.

TGI has always meant something else to me. It’s a term that developed early in my correspondence with M, short for “the topic of greatest interest”. It became an all-purpose noun. (Now the tgi category maybe makes more sense to you.) So here, on this Friday, let us talk of tgi.

What is my tgi? Broadly speaking, an interest in corporal punishment, so tgi can be synonymous with whacking. Thus its verb form, used in the negative: de-tgi. As in, de-tgi the apartment – my dad is coming to stay! (i.e. put all implements well out of sight).

So what kind of tgi do I like, mainly?

• domestic cp of a semi-con nature [by semi-con I mean that the recipient doesn't like it, but basically accepts it]
• English school cp (semi-con)
• enemas

I could get very tedious laying out what appeals to me in what contexts, suffice to say that things I’m interested in doing RL (or have done) are only a subset of things that appeal to me in fantasy or in well-written stories. There are lots of things that turn me FW that I would never want to do RL. [If I'm abbreviating too much, try the glossary page.]

It is massively distressing to admit this, but here it is: I can’t clearly remember the last whacking I gave or the last I got. The last I got was in RP’s study, across his knee on the couch, unprotected, hand spanking, which was usual. I don’t exactly remember when it was (other than between New Year’s 07/08 and May 08) or what it was for. There had been a dry spell. We were both wrapped up in work and miscellanea. MISTAKE. As for the last I gave, I’m even less clear. I’m guessing it was an on-the-fly application of the “persuader” or the slipper, given in the kitchen around dinner time to encourage better attitude. Or it might have been otk (him naked) in bed during a commercial break with THBTNFK (the hairbrush that’s not for kids). [pictures another day, kids.] I hate myself that I can’t remember. I really don’t remember the last time Casey got That Thing [enema], except I think the bulb finally was breaking and leaking a lot. We hadn’t got another one yet, but the prospect of going together to the surgical supply store nearby and getting another bulb was both mortifying and a little exciting. Who knew what RP would have said to the man? We’ll never find out.

I was trying to write something fun that would cheer everyone up. FAIL!!

Ok, well, this isn’t strictly tgi, but it made me laff lots, from the Fail Blog: