Amerika

 

The Fucking Memoir I'm (Not) Writing

Should it be that?  A memoir of fucking?

I mean, that's one of the more interesting things about me -- my busy sexual history and its prompts and fall out.

If I can even remember what sex with other people was like -- seeing I haven't enjoyed it since 2014 -- the last year I had sex with Will or anyone else.  In fact, I think the last time I had sex was in the summer of that year when I went to Pocatello to pick up all the rest of my Dad's paintings and papers, from almost all of which I have since been freed.  And the last time was like the first time (1969) in that I had an orgasm and the male involved didn't.  And and I didn't care.

Oh, I did the work I was supposed to do but he was my age sans the blue pill ...

And I found that I had little interest in what he wanted to do -- which was play his guitar as foreplay and sing one of his songs.  And the setting was off -- he was sleeping on the floor in the back of his shop due to spousal separation (I guess she was in the house?).

Around that time was also my last sex with Will.  By 2014 he had forgotten how to kiss and he had developed phimosis which made giving head unpleasant for me.  So after that I told him, "I'm not doing sex anymore."  That didn't stop him from masturbating every morning.  

Well, I can't say for sure every morning. Let's just say that any morning before the last few months of his life, when I would look into the bedroom around the time he would be waking, I could see the blankets moving in a rhythmic action.  I'm glad he had that pleasure and I was sorry we weren't able to share the experience anymore.  

I had a therapist at the time who thought of me as "good" in the way he wanted me to be "good."  He assumed that Will and I weren't having sex because Will was like a child in his dementia.  Nope.  It was the dick with a hat.  This therapist also assumed that I had quit a Friends With Benefits relationship in 2012 because I was growing up emotionally and feeling remorse.  Nope.  I quit it because my "lover" got fat and that wasn't part of the bargain.  (When one is having a sexual affair, it behooves one to remain sexy looking.)

A sad thing for me is that Will remained sexy-looking to me until his death -- even with all his seborrheic keratosis that made him look rather leopardy.  

And I'm still attracted to tall, thin men with beards.  

Oh, and handsome guys.  And beautiful women.  Well, pretty much any slender person with even facial features and a friendly smile.  

But the thought of all the work that sex at my age would require just makes me tired.

Always Learning

 Over the past week I've learned about paint and wallpaper.  I decided, based on a comment of a FB friend, to paint over some old wallpaper rather than trying to peel it off first.  

Well, I discovered that paint will cause old wallpaper to blister, thus making it MUCH easier to strip off the wall.  In fact, it started stripping itself yesterday, wrapping around the paint roller.  I still have bits of seafoam green on my fingernails.  

Nevertheless, I persisted, being very careful to avoid dripping on my new floors.  So now the two bedrooms and the living room are painted except for the art painting.

And by art painting I mean the blue sky and clouds that are going up in the art room and the perhaps tree that will go up in the living room, if I decide it's necessary.

Sadly, the bedroom space is STILL off-gassing.  Why?  It seems to be the only room with really heavy smell still.  So, even though the new bed is being delivered today I probably won't be sleeping upstairs for awhile yet.  

Meanwhile, the downstairs where the air is "good" (except that it's full of dust) is still a messy pit.  There are baskets and boxes of pens and office supplies I haven't gone through yet.  Not to mention I haven't yet unpacked my new musical instrument.

That Joan Didion Book

 Around the time I first started getting rid of the books, I sent my niece a box of Joan Didion, including The Year of Magical Thinking.  Just days after I sent a box of 12 books on UPS to Los Angeles, I received a copy of that famous book from my friend Lee.

I finally started reading it last week when I was at the Oxford avoiding being in the house while the floors were off-gassing.  (Sadly, they're still stinking a bit so I plan to stay downstairs until I can no longer smell them.)  It turns out one chapter was helpful but so much of the rest of it is about Joan's pain and the terrible illness of her daughter that I just can't read it.  I don't have the strength right now to hold other people's pain as well as my own.  

Although it IS helpful to know that a rich, sophisticated writer was so fucked up by grief that she kept thinking her spouse wasn't dead.  And, just now as I'm writing this, I stopped and opened randomly and found pp. 192-3 where she talks about self-pity.

“People in grief think a great deal about self-pity. We worry it, dread it, scourge our thinking for signs of it. We fear that our actions will reveal the condition tellingly described as 'dwelling on it.' . . . We remind ourselves repeatedly that our own loss is nothing compared to the loss experienced (or, the even worse thought, not experienced) by he or she who died; this attempt at corrective thinking serves only to plunge us deeper into the self-regarding deep. (Why didn’t I see that, why am I so selfish.) The very language we use when we think about self-pity betrays the deep abhorrence in which we hold it: self-pity is feeling sorry for yourself, self-pity is thumb-sucking, self-pity is boo hoo poor me, self-pity is the condition in which those feeling sorry for themselves indulge, or even wallow. Self-pity remains both the most common and the most universally reviled of our character defects, its pestilential destructiveness accepted as given…In fact the grieving have urgent reasons, even an urgent need, to feel sorry for themselves. Husbands walk out, wives walk out, divorces happen, but these husbands and wives leave behind them webs of intact associations, however acrimonious. Only the survivors of a death are truly left alone.” 

 

 This aloneness after 50 years is proving tougher than I imagined.  The grief became worse through April than it had been in January.  My friend Lilli Ann says that this is because in January I was in shock and now I'm actually grieving.  I'm also doing my best to sober up from weed.  The trouble with not being high all day is that I'm sad all day.  So I'm crying every fucking day.  And, yes, I'm drinking more water to replace fluids.

And Didion was so right when she comments somewhere in the book (I lost the place) about the idiocy of the comment, "You'll always have your memories" as though that somehow makes things okay.  First of all, memories aren't people.  A memory isn't a warm body that speaks.  And for me, there's also the issue that my own brain is damaged in such a way that I don't carry a lot of my experiences.  Because of a childhood of hypervigilance, three concussions, drinking to blackout in youth, and excessive weed usage, my ability to recall specificities of my life is limited.  It was Will's job to remember many of our adventures.

And now, the adventures I remember have lost the one person with whom I could recall them.  The little jokes we had.  The references.  Of course these were gone by the last year of his life but he was still there where I could hug him.  And I held him every day.  And the day before he went into his death coma he smiled at me with love in his old eyes and told me he loved me. 

I am glad he died when he did (he started his death coma on Christmas, like it was a present from the universe).  

And I miss him so very much.

New Ink

 I finally got the hawk tattoo I've been thinking about for a few years.  It turned out to be not what I expected but exactly what I wanted.

The tattoo grows out of a spiritual awareness I had some time back.  I was at an Episcopal women's retreat at the Catholic retreat center up near Powell Butte.  I was meditating on my life of sexual "sin" during which I had treated other people like my meat.

As I was looking out from a room upstairs, I saw a hawk gliding across a field.  The Holy Spirit spoke in me saying, "God made that hawk, predator that she is.  Mice are not grateful to God for the hawk as the hawk is grateful for the mice.  Nevertheless, they are both made for this world, as were you.  If you were made a raptor, not a mouse, accept yourself as you are."

So, I'm a raptor with a cross on my jess.  I continue to return to the one who owns me.

People Care

 So, today I was looking for chandeliers at a few places and I began crying in Lowes and was really wailing when I got to my car.  So I was sitting in my pretty little car, sobbing, when I heard a knock on the window.  A man about my age, maybe a little older, asked me if I was okay.  I told him that my husband had died recently and sometimes I was just overcome.  He told me to hug my "little dog" and to take care of myself.  I shook his hand (before I realized mine probably had snot on it). 

Cocky

 Ok.  I have to stop crying.  

Maybe it will help to tell a story about the last time in my life when I felt close to being this alone -- my first quarter at the University of Utah.  I moved down there on my own in 1984, separated from both my spouse and my young lover, driving the 160 miles north on alternating weekends to visit each; living in an awful, cockroach-infested apartment with no phone so I needed to make calls from the phone box on the corner of Third and Third downtown.  It was a terrible, hard quarter and I survived.  So I'm sure I'll get through this current agony.  To do so, it might help to tell the story of "Kake," pronounced "Cocky."  Maybe telling this story will remind me that I am strong as a 1979 Castro Clone.

My very first graduate paper in the doctoral program at the University of Utah (1984) was an analysis of three pamphlets about "Kake".

Who is Kake (Cocky)?  Kake is a leatherman created by famous cartoon pornographer/eroticist Tom of Finland.  He exists in little pamphlet sized booklets as well as in the collected Tom of Finland.  Back around '83 my friend Lee sent me three of these booklets, with my name on the front and wordless, visual stories of hot men with big dicks inside.

My first graduate class was "Introduction to Graduate Studies." It introduced us new Utes to the department's professors and provided an overview of what an academic life was like.  We wrote papers and then got a chance to present one as part of a classroom panel.  Because the one contemporary critic/theorist I knew at that time was Michele Foucault and I had devoured his "History of Sexuality," I decided to write a Foucauldian analysis of the Kake comics as my paper to present.  I argued that the gay porn pretended to be freeing but instead created a very rule-governed universe of sexual expression.  My paper included the word "fisting" without any explanation so I wound up defining it in class.

Because I'd felt strongly linked to the gay male community since high school, and had already written and published two pieces of gay erotica, I was completely comfortable with the topic.  Not so some members of the class, I much later learned, when a friend told me that everyone in the department had heard about my paper by the next day.  Just as when Will and I married, I was a scandal without realizing it.

This paper became my very first conference performance in 1986 in Atlanta.  As a beginner, that was a wonderful experience because the room was packed for the sex papers.  I was strong in those days.  I was also almost 34 years younger.  Nevertheless, maybe it's time to go back to my queer roots.

Maybe what I need now is more cockiness -- to be more Kake.

AND grief is back

 It demanded to be let out of the box on Tuesday but I refused all day to cry.  

Then yesterday, at a new tattooist, I started wondering if I would be able to do proper aftercare on my back and I started tearing up and then the pain hit my heart and gut and I started seriously crying.  My tattooist suggested in a very kind and caring way that it probably wasn't the best day for me to get a tattoo.  

Everything was hurting me.  By that I mean all my usual complaints.  My friends don't call me.  I'm a terrible person for needing so much. 

And I started obsessing about the friend who got angry with me.  Should I send him an email to tell him I value our previous relationship and could we get a mediator to fix it?  Should I ask a friend or his wife to tell him that?  I am feeling like whatever I do in that relationship it will be wrong. He turned into somebody I didn't recognize.   I don't understand how he could criticize me for lacking perspective within a month of my spouse's death or how he could get physically angry at a woman in grief whom he knew had PTSD from rape, caregiving, etc.  I don't like feeling afraid of a friend but it's happened to me before.  People whom I'm loved have had this need to shame me for being who I am AFTER they have told me they love me for who I am.  

Shades of "me saynted mither."

So, back at the tattooist, I left, crying.  Went back to the hotel, crying.  And ate too many gummies and just knocked myself out for most of the day, falling asleep straddled across the bed with my dog.  At 5:00 I went back to the house that is so torn up right now to see what was going on with the floors.  Then I went downtown to charge the car and Winston and I had dinner outside at the Pine Tavern.

I felt guilty about weed in the middle of the day because I've been trying to taper off.  On the days when I don't use I'm sick so dealing with grief becomes dealing with grief and raging anxiety and a badly functioning intestinal tract.  But I do need to quit before going to Europe or I'll be sick over there.

And maybe the last couple of days have been hard because I can't work in the house during the day to clean it up and everything is so torn up.

Of course, just opening a newspaper is also enough to give one raging anxiety.  But at least I no longer need to think about shooting Will if the H-Bombs drop.  But why does my anger rise when I see people in gas cars lining up for coffee?  I never think of the planet being in danger.  Really, there are "billions and billions" of planets and stars.  The end of this one is no big deal.  But the pain and anguish of millions of people and animals dying is real -- and it's real right now. 

This is what an existential crisis in the middle of a world in crisis looks like.