Why do I court failure?

At one point back in 2016, when we first got back together, Marie told me that decades earlier—when we knew each other in college—she had been racking her brains trying to figure out why we got along so well. That sounds like a strange thing to say, but here's what she meant by it.

By the time she was in middle school, Marie's home life was hopelessly dysfunctional: her father had committed suicide, and her mother was a blackout drunk who had once molested her all the way to orgasm (back when Marie was 12 and didn't understand what was going on). See, for example, this post and this one. And when Marie looked around at her friends, the only ones she felt naturally at-ease with were the ones whose home lives were equally dysfunctional. So she just figured that's how it was: she was messed up, and the only people she could really relax around were equally messed up.

Then she met me, and right away felt at ease around me. So she tried to create conversational openings to let me explain how my family was dysfunctional, while she shared how her family was dysfunctional. She figured it would be a bonding exercise.

Only I never took the bait. On the one hand, I had long since internalized the rule that you Never Talk Your Family Down to Others. And on the other hand, I genuinely didn't understand that there was anything dysfunctional about us. By conventional standards we were all pretty normal. My dad sometimes drank a lot, but not to the point that he ever lost his job or got into fights. My parents stayed married during ten disastrous years of running a business that they hated and didn't understand (or not at first). We didn't have a lot of money, but somehow we got by. So I never had any lurid tales of dysfunction to share with Marie, and she was left baffled. How can I possibly feel so at ease with him when he and his family are so normal?

In the first couple of months that we were back in communication, she kept probing at this point until I finally asked her to stop. Also after a couple of months we started fucking, and we had better things to talk about.

Over time, of course, I have come to have a clearer understanding of some of the mind games that Father played ... mostly not, I think, out of actual malice, but in an attempt to placate some of his own demons. And I've talked about how he interacted with me using a power dynamic that felt very sexual, even if we both had our clothes on. (See, for example, this post and this post; for a more light-hearted approach, you might also try this post.)

But just this evening, I thought of a neat formula that summarizes the profound ambivalence—and that's putting it nicely!—that I feel about great achievement.

Father forced me to feel pride in my achievements in the same way that Marie's mother forced her to feel orgasms.

I'm not sure I have stories to back that up—well, I've got one but I'm not ready to share it yet. Other than that one, I think it mostly took the form of little remarks here and there by the way, bits and bobs that I probably can't remember accurately or at all but that contributed to an overall ambience of expectations.

But the end result for both of us was very similar. 

• For years, Marie could not take pleasure in sex, or at best she could take only the limpest and most qualified form of pleasure. 
• For years, I have not been able to take pleasure in my achievements, or only the limpest and most qualified form of pleasure.

What does this look like in practice?

• When people praise Son1 and Son2, I agree that they have both grown into fine young men; but I insist that parents don't have a lot of influence on that, and that the credit goes to them for choosing to become so good. The only parenting victory that I will own is my forcing Wife to let both boys go to boarding school, in order to get them away from the two of us!
• Back when I was working, my greatest victories at work were the kind of thing where I could easily say, "Everyone came together as a team and did their parts really well. All I had to contribute was a little organization, and taking minutes." And you can bet that's exactly what I said.
• I have confessed to you lot (who would never tell a soul, and besides I'm hiding behind a mask) that yes, in odd moments I have occasionally felt little wisps of pride in my ancient academic achievements, back during the Buchanan Administration; I have also said that those wisps of pride feel like "a really degrading sexual fetish," or like "masturbating in public." And of course you remember the cartoon I posted about it all. 

So honestly I think it's a pretty good analogy. It captures just how slimy and unclean I feel around the whole topic of achievement.

And how much cleaner I feel around failure, by comparison. 

P.S.: I think this insight helps explain much of the ambivalence I have around school and anything that looks like it. I've talked about that a lot over the years, but see especially this post and this one. Now I'm wrestling with the question how much of this post about Marie applies to me too. I think any simple answer will be wrong, and that the true answer is "Not 100% but also not 0%."

  

Meeting my Shadow, 2

Just a quick follow-up to this post from New Year's Day.

Ten minutes ago I was on the sidewalk out in front, stretching my legs for a few minutes, and I thought about this ongoing argument with Marie. And suddenly it occurred to me: one reason that Marie's moralism drives me so crazy is that I used to do the same thing. (Maybe I still do, but I try hard not to.)

At the moment that the thought struck me, there was an example to hand as well. Now, ten minutes later, I don't remember what it was. Oh wait, yes I do.

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity

I get most of my news from Twitter (or I guess now it's called "X") so I have an admittedly eccentric understanding of the hot topics of the day. One that I have seen a lot of posts about lately is the sexualization of children. I try not to read the details, but even a cursory glance tells me that the instances which make it all the way to Twitter are pretty horrific. And the discussion of the perpetrators seems to be mostly about whether to tar-and-feather them before or after drawing-and-quartering them. In any event, nobody doubts that they are evil people with evil intentions.

I'm not about to make excuses for these people, and it seems clear that sometimes the impact they have on the children who come under their influence is really bad. But I find myself wondering, in an intellectual sort of way, whether they are actually motivated by malice (or cruelty or lust or any of those things), or whether in some cases the problem might not be no more than mind-boggling stupidity?

Punishment for my sins?

Several times in the last year, most recently in my post last night, I have described my marriage as a "punishment for my sins." (See also here and here. I use the phrase in another context here.)

But there is another possible explanation for my marriage besides this one. I'm reluctant to explain what I mean, because I find it embarrassing. But surely the time is long past when I should worry about anything like that, right? We're all friends here. Besides, none of you knows who I am in real life.

Another kind of fear

Yesterday I wrote about my fear of having to make a lot of decisions, as one obstacle that stands in the way of my getting published. But there's another.

I am really afraid of putting myself out there.

Narcissistic Personality Quiz, take 2

I was scrolling through some old posts this afternoon (sheesh, don't I have anything better to do with my time?) and I came across this one from five and a half years ago. Unlike the 7-deadly-sins quiz, where I think I am settling into a routine (my most recent instance is here), I hadn't taken this one again in the intervening time. So sure, what the hell? I tried it again.

You can find it here: http://psychcentral.com/quizzes/narcissistic.htm. 

Remember the scoring criteria:

Between 12 and 15 is average.
Celebrities often score closer to 18.
Narcissists score over 20.

This time I scored a 12, so it's nice to know I have worked my way up to normal. I wish I could remember what my answers were last time, so I would know what I had changed.

Something I didn't make a note of last time -- and maybe this is an enhancement to the quiz -- is that the scoring page also gives a breakdown of how I rate on several different components of narcissism.

Quoting from the website, those components are:

Authority

Authority refers to a person's leadership skills and power. People who score higher on authority like to be in charge and gain power, often for power's sake alone.

Self-Sufficiency

This trait refers to how self-sufficient a person is, that is, how much you rely on others versus your own abilities to meet your needs in life.

Superiority

This trait refers to whether a person feels they are more superior than those around them. You scored particularly high in superiority, suggesting you feel you are superior to most others.

Exhibitionism

This trait refers to a person's need to be the center of attention, and willingness to ensure they are the center of attention (even at the expense of others' needs).

Exploitativeness

This trait refers to how willing you are to exploit others in order to meet your own needs or goals.

Vanity

This trait refers to a person's vanity, or their belief in one's own superior abilities and attractiveness compared to others.

Entitlement

This trait refers to the expectation and amount of entitlement a person has in their lives, that is, unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with one's expectations. People who score higher on this trait generally have a greater expectation of entitlement, while those who score lower expect little from others or life.

And here, I think, is the explanation for the paradox that I noted last time I took the quiz, when I had so much trouble reconciling what feels to me like extravagant conceit with my (even now, comparatively) low score on this quiz. Because I scored particularly high on my sense of superiority, pretty high on authority, but low on exhibitionism, vanity, and entitlement. And I scored a flat zero on self-sufficiency.

This is pretty much what I said before ... conceit tempered with timidity. I think one of the differences compared with last time is that I gave myself a few more points for authority, based partly on Marie's observations to me about "the Tanatu charisma." (She came up with the phrase after meeting both my sons and learning that none of the three of us has ever been able to disappear into the wallpaper.)

I suppose it is nice to know I'm still not at pathological levels ....
      

Pounding on the door

Marie was here a week ago to visit. We tootled around town some. kept talking about going out to a new restaurant I want to try but never got that far, and talked, and fucked. Yes, well.

So it was late Friday night, and Marie was squealing loudly to heaven for all she was worth, ... and suddenly I heard pounding on my door.

Ooops. That's right, I live in an apartment. It's midnight. Maybe other people want to get some sleep.

I didn't know which neighbor it was, and I sure as hell wasn't going to go answer the door stark naked and smelling like sex. So I just stopped dead. Marie stopped making noise. Silently I climbed over to my side of the bed, blew out the one candle we had going, and we went to sleep.

The next morning it turned out that Marie hadn't heard the pounding when I did. She just stopped because I stopped doing things to stimulate her. So I explained and made sure she understood she really had to be quieter.

That afternoon I got a text message from Son 1, who has been traveling for work all month. (He hasn't moved out yet, so his absence was part of why Marie hadn't bothered to hold it down.) He said, "So your downstairs neighbor texted me last night saying she heard yelling or screaming. You know anything about that?"

I replied, "Umm ... er ... yeah. It's fine. Sorry we woke them. Nothing was wrong and nobody was hurt."

Son 1 answered that by forwarding me this picture. I don't blame him.

Then I sent a slightly longer text to the couple downstairs:

"Hi! I just now heard from Son 1 that you texted him last night asking if everything was OK. I am really embarrassed and really very sorry for keeping you awake. Everything was OK and nobody was hurt, but I feel terrible for being a bad neighbor. Umm ... Marie has been visiting for a week but her flight home is this afternoon. So it should be quieter. Again, I'm really sorry."

It must have been four hours later that I finally heard back.

"Hi Hosea, just now able to respond. I apologize and also feel embarrassed by not thinking how that could have been a different kind of scream. I'm just glad everyone is OK! My apologies again. I'm glad you guys had a nice week together!"

What I think that means is that there's lots of embarrassment to go around, but it all turned out OK in the end. And I suppose it's good that my neighbors care enough to be worried about screaming ....
  

Son 1 has a car

No sooner did Son 1 get back to my place after driving Wife around all weekend — swearing loudly he wasn't going back for at least a month — than she called him again. Someone in her church owns a car dealership, and was getting a car in that might suit him well. If he bought it he could give her back her second car that he is borrowing.

He went up, looked at it, and ended up buying it. Or rather, she bought it for him out of her savings, listing the two of them as co-owners, and he's going to buy her out over time plus 3%. He is insured through her and he's going to pay her the extra increment that he will cost her. They haven't settled on payment terms yet, but it sounds like car payment + insurance + student loan payment will be close to $1000 a month. And he hasn't actually started working yet.

On the other hand he's got a car, while I still don't. Am I ashamed of that? Yes, kind of. To be sure, he wouldn't have it without Wife's intervention. And she used to play that role for me too ... the spur that got me off my ass to get something done.

On the other hand that's kind of an excuse. I'm supposed to be the adult here, right.

Sigh.

Sent from my iPhone

What young women believe about their own sexuality

This is a companion piece to my rant of a few months ago against purity culture.

Only this time you don't have to listen to me. This time it's a TED talk by somebody who's done interviews and listened to the answers -- so maybe she knows what she's talking about? Just a thought.

Listen and weep ... or, better, listen and then try to make it better.

Lovingly molested

Marie visited me for a week over Thanksgiving, and just flew home tonight. Together we drove out to where most of my family was gathered for the holiday. She met them; they met her. A good time was had by all.

But also we talked and talked, as always. And a couple days ago, the conversation was a little interesting.

I was talking about my dad -- specifically, about how he was always trying to worm his way into learning about my private life, as if he were groping at me with his questions. I've written about it here, and probably other places. Marie pegged his behavior nicely as "voyeuristic". And for a long time I didn't have a very good idea why he would even want to know all this stuff about me, except that he always had. Sometimes I thought maybe it was because he enjoyed the power that came from knowing things and being able to make me squirm when he talked about them.

But as I talked to Marie, I added that I had recently thought of another hypothesis ... another possible reason that might have explained his behavior. And I told her that this hypothesis could have meaning for her too.

My idea was this: maybe my dad was lonely. Well, of course I know he was lonely -- he didn't have many friends, and those he had rarely saw him. He didn't have any family except my mother's, and over the years he had alienated most of those. He didn't have a job to go to. So yeah, he was lonely.

And his social skills were a little off. He could be entertaining -- he was an actor by trade, after all -- but he didn't trust people and so he had trouble making new friends. He wanted to be loved and accepted, but he was afraid to let himself be honest and real with others ... and that has to be the first step. The only circle he (mostly) trusted were his immediate family: my mother, my brother, and me.

So I think he wanted to be my friend. Actually I know that's what he wanted, because many times -- usually when he was really drunk -- that's exactly what he would say. "I don't want you to think of me as a father ... just as an older friend who has been through some things you haven't yet, so you can ask me questions and I can give you advice." (Notice, by the way, that this implies he had a really unpleasant idea of what fatherhood entails. I think this is related to his lifelong hatred of authority.) And so I think what he wanted was for us to sit around shooting the shit and "lying about women" [his phrase], the way he imagined that Real Guys must do in the locker room. (My father was a classic Non-Athlete, but I think his image of masculinity must have dated from high school gym class -- which he hated, but which he must have thought he should have liked in order to be a Real Man.)

In short: I think he pawed at my life with a perverted, voyeuristic lust because he wanted to be my friend, and didn't know how. And didn't know that it was impossible, because the Father-Son relationship is prior to the Friend-Friend relationship and excludes it.

Marie thought this was very interesting, both charitable and plausible. But what the hell did it have to do with her?

Well, I don't remember if I've told this story yet but her mother molested her when Marie was 12. Her mother was an alcoholic, and one night (after Bible study!) she came into Marie's bedroom and started massaging Marie's vulva until she came. Marie was really upset at this but figured that a Good Girl wouldn't tell her mother to stop; also, that God wouldn't have allowed it unless she (Marie) was already hopelessly corrupt and soiled. It fucked up her ideas about sex for decades, and that in turn seems to have crippled her sex life until she and I got together early this year.

And I asked Marie, Why did she do it? She wasn't getting off, after all. And she probably wasn't particularly aroused by it -- as she objected later, when Marie confronted her with this and she said that she had no recollection of it (probably true because she blacked out a lot), "I like men." (Marie's father was dead by then, of suicide. Marie's mother was drinking heavily and fucking anything in pants.) So why did she do it? Marie didn't know.

Well, I suggested, maybe it was the same kind of thing that was going on with my dad. Maybe at some level she thought that she was doing Marie a favor. After all here was her oldest daughter, just on the cusp of womanhood ... about to come into her sexual inheritance. If you assume that her mother's higher reasoning abilities were all wiped clean out by the alcohol, it's not so crazy to think that she might have thought this was somehow a good thing.

Of course I told Marie that this was just a hypothesis. She'd have to think whether there was any external data that could make it look likely.

And after a minute she said, "Oh shit. There is."

Marie's mother was a very feminine woman. She was pretty, and paid a lot of attention to her appearance. She always had to have a man in her life, and it thrilled her to be the focus of some man's adoration. Marie was 12 -- just at the cusp of womanhood -- and didn't care about any of that. In mythological metaphor, she was totally devoted to Artemis and scorned Aphrodite. (See, e.g., this link for just how dangerous that can be.) Marie's mother kept trying to convince her to care about boys.

And so, Marie went on, ... maybe it makes sense that her mother would try to show her why it was worth it to care about boys. To show her how good sex feels. To let her experience directly why sex and romance can reasonably dominate your life. Throughout it all her mother kept saying "It feels so good." Maybe that really meant (if you look through the drunken haze) "It's worth the sacrifices. Make yourself pretty. Make yourself sweet and soft. Because then men will want to fuck you, and there is nothing sweeter in all the world."

But that means, Marie went on, that maybe she still loved me even while she was molesting me.

She was sobbing softly into my shoulder by this point. I held her, and kissed her, and tried to reassure her that yes, it was perfectly possible her mother still loved her. I reminded her that many of the terrible, cruel, destructive things that people do are caused not by malice but just by ignorance and clumsiness. And if anything can bring on ignorance and clumsiness, heavy drinking is surely on the list. So yeah ... it's all possible.

We talked about a lot of other things over the course of the week, but that may have been the most unexpected.
  

Reply to Marie

Dear Marie,

Thank you for writing. I was thrilled to see your handwriting on the envelope in my mailbox, and your letter itself was entirely fair -- even generous in the last paragraph. I am grateful to be allowed to write you.

You said I could write if there are things it would ease my mind to say. Can I start by saying that I am sorry? Time and again, over the years we knew each other, you offered me your heart in honest, vulnerable trust. Time and again I stood still -- stupidly, silently, cruelly -- and then ran away in the other direction. (Or fainted, which is just as bad.) I talked endlessly about the bureaucracy of the Byzantine Empire or the weather in Utah, but I never said a word to acknowledge that you even existed, let alone that you were alive and suffering and right in front of me. I'm ashamed of my behavior, and I'm deeply sorry for the pain I inflicted. I wish I could ask your forgiveness, but honestly I have done nothing to earn it; so in that respect, at least, I had better hold my tongue.

You also said that I could ask questions, so here is the first one: What am I still overlooking? I want to understand what it looks like from your perspective; but I'm all too aware that my track record there is not good. What is visible to me is the unrelenting rejection you got at my hands. But likely the view from your side holds things I still haven't seen at all. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that there are plenty of ways I have trodden on you, all oblivious. You may even have told me about them before, and I didn't hear. If you care to tell me again, I'm listening now.

__________

Is it any help to hear what this looked like from my side? Maybe not. It's probably not true that to understand all is to forgive all; there are crimes we understand and still condemn. So you can skip this next bit if you like.

Also, some parts of this are too long, but other parts might be too short. If anything I say is unclear, please feel free to ask questions. I will answer them.

How is it possible for a man to be so out of touch with his own feelings that he doesn't realize until in his late forties that he is shy? It sounds fatuous and unbelievable but that was me. All my life I have felt strong, sometimes crippling, social anxiety -- strong enough (as you know) to immobilize me with a kind of aphasia. But my father was a latter-day Falstaff, who saw nothing in other people except what he could use as a foil for his own ongoing performance. So I got no validation that shyness was even a thing, let alone that I might suffer from it or might need to recognize it in myself before I could relate to others. The only coping techniques that I learned were a loud voice and a knack for dominating conversations with entertaining trivia. I didn't even enjoy it. I could tell that I was isolating myself from others, walling myself off. But I literally did not know what else to do.

OK, so I was shy. And I didn't know I was shy. I had no words to name my own feelings (to say nothing of anybody else's) and no way to understand them. Worse than that, I didn't even know what my own feelings were. That, too, sounds impossible. I can tell that as I write it. But all I learned from my father the actor was how to perform. And I didn't have to know my own feelings in order to perform -- all I had to know was what people wanted to hear next.

My coping techniques "worked" well enough with most people, if by "worked" you mean that I got through the day. But you weren't "most people". Far better than I deserved, you cared enough to get closer than that. And I froze. When you asked what I felt, I couldn't make my mouth move ... and even if I could have, I didn't know the answer. I didn't know what I felt. But that's crazy -- how can you not know what you feel? I had to know. Only I didn't. I had to say something. Only I couldn't. So I got more anxious ... and froze harder ... and the seconds ticked away. Into minutes. Into hours, weeks, years.

I knew I was hurting you. I remember after the big party at the end of your freshman year, when you took the risk to speak openly to me and I fainted. Inside, I was thrilled that you cared enough to help me out of the prison I had built for myself. I wanted to run back to you, to hold and be held, to open all of my walls. I also knew that after you had made yourself so vulnerable, every hour I waited was a dagger in your heart. So not only did I want to run back to you, but I knew that I had to. I knew it was cruel not to.

And. I. Could. Not. Make. Myself. Go.

It sounds insane. I wouldn't believe it if I hadn't lived it. I could curse myself as a coward; I could hate myself for cruelty. I did both those things. But I could not make myself go see you and speak openly about my feelings ... feelings that mostly I didn't know and couldn't name. The only one I could name was fear.

It's not like this got miraculously better when I married Wife. Even as I (very slowly) began to learn an emotional vocabulary, I encountered a new problem -- that to know and name my true feelings would require me to say honestly that my marriage was sometimes (too often) an abusive nightmare. But I felt it was my duty not to say that. I felt that no gentleman could say such things about his wife, even if they were true. So my road towards emotional honesty has been a long one. And strictly speaking I suppose it would be presumptuous to say I've arrived. How can I know what blind spots I still have? But I'm better at it than I used to be.

__________

Enough with the self-serving excuses. You said I could ask questions, and there are a few on my mind. Some of these are pretty superficial, just because it has been a long time. Others are maybe less so. I understand you haven't promised to answer, but I'd be grateful to hear back about any of them that you feel like taking up.

• Are you happy?
• Are you still working with Landmark?
• If yes, what is it like after all these years? (i.e., how is it different from when you were first with them?)
• If no, how did it come to an end?
• Schmidt says you have a job that really suits you. Can you tell me about it?
• Schmidt says (if I understood him right) that you have been writing Harry Potter fan fiction. Can you tell me about it? Is any of it published online, or somewhere else that I can find it?
• Schmidt says your mother died. How long ago? My father died in September. Let me know if this is something you feel like talking about.
• Are you with somebody romantically these days?
• If yes, I'd love to hear all about it.
• If no, how does that show up for you?
• Have you ever written a "six-word memoir" for yourself? (If you aren't familiar with these, check Wikipedia or Google.) If yes, can I read it?

__________

 

In Ray Bradbury's novel Something Wicked This Way Comes, the father, Charles Halloway, defines "love" as "shared experience". (This is in chapter 39; my edition puts it on page 145.) Of course, "shared experience" isn't always roses. Sometimes it can be very painful. But pain isn't always the last word. Buddhists talk about "transforming suffering"; in more secular language we talk about learning from our mistakes. Whatever the words, I have found over the years that some of my most painful experiences have helped me learn to be better than I was. And this gives me hope.

Your mileage may vary, of course. There's nothing I can tell you about your own pain and it's none of my stinking business to try. But my wish for you is that pain not be the last word. And so I hope.

Honoring our "shared experience" and wishing you a joyful New Year,

Hosea

Crime

This story starts years ago.

The boys were young. We all still lived at home in our house. And one day -- God knows why -- Wife started telling the boys about my academic achievements when I was young (grade school, high school, college).

Now I had made a point of never discussing any of this. It's all ancient history and I figured they didn't need to know. Besides, there is something really pathetic about anyone whose greatest achievements in life happened when he was sixteen. If I've got nothing better to say for myself than that I was valedictorian of my high school and that I had great SAT scores, ... that's pretty small and sad, isn't it? Better I should just skip all of that. How could they possibly care? And if I make a big deal about it when they don't care, won't I just come across as self-absorbed and clueless?

But suddenly there was Wife, telling them all about it. She probably exaggerated it; in the first place she wasn't there back then, and in the second place she really really cares about this stuff. She craves the kind of recognition that makes me run and hide. So it sounded to me like she was laying it on kind of thick.

I got mad. I yelled for her to stop. I demanded how could she do such a thing when she knew I didn't want her to talk about all that.

She didn't understand. Never mind that I had asked her not to discuss it ... she disregarded that request completely because to her mind she wasn't saying anything bad. In her mind, she was praising me; therefore she was saying good things; therefore the fact that I had expressly asked her not to somehow disappeared ... or didn't matter ... or never happened. Because it was OK by her lights, that made it OK simply. It's as if I couldn't really have meant what I said when I asked her to keep it a secret.

I tried and tried to get her to understand that tastes differ. Values differ. Just because it was OK with her didn't make it OK with me. She couldn't understand. She couldn't even understand that she didn't understand. It was as if I were a mime ... as if I were mouthing and gesturing but no sound came out. Her inability to get it was that total.

I felt that way a lot around Wife, and I kept looking for ways to break through so she could hear me. I kept looking for something I could say, something so bizarre that she would realize that she really didn't understand me ... something so bizarre that she would drop all her certainties, open her ears, and just listen.

In all my years with Wife, I never found it. But that particular day, while I was groping for something to say, I hit upon asking her, "Do you just hate your children? Why else would you tell them this stuff?" I wanted her to understand that I meant (in small part) "Don't lay a trip on them that they have to live up to such-and-such an image. Let them be who they are." I also wanted her to feel slapped in the face -- shocked enough that she would trouble to listen.

That part didn't work, but she did call D to complain about how bizarrely I was talking. (This was back when D was still Wife's best friend.) And D wrote me a letter demanding to know how I could possibly think Wife hated the boys just because she was praising me to them.

I said it was because I was startled. I was taken by surprise by her telling the boys about my victories in school a hundred years ago, so I overreacted. D wrote back to say that was crazy: there's no way that just being surprised or startled could make me say something so extreme, and in any event why should I be startled instead of pleased? (In her own way, D was just as chronically unable and unwilling to understand me as Wife ever was.)

So I tried to explain by telling a story. Think of it, I told her, like this ....

Suppose that you were a young woman in Germany in the 1930's, and you married a man with political ambitions who rose to be the Gauleiter of some important city.  In the last stages of the War, your husband is shot by partisans, and somehow you escape undetected to North Carolina.  You adopt a Southern accent, change your name, and take a job teaching ... and nobody knows about the life you used to lead.  By working very hard, by never letting up your guard for even a moment, you manage to erase your former life completely.  This means there are no embarrassing questions about war crimes; no difficult moments where you are asked how you personally feel about the Jews; no angry strangers lecturing you about how their Daddies were shot down in cold blood by your goddamned sonsabitching Kraut soldiers and what the hell do you have to say about it now ... none of that.  You have achieved one important part of the American Dream, by completely reinventing yourself.  Nobody has any idea that you didn't spring directly out of the red mud in the small rural town where you teach.  And then one day, as you are shopping for groceries, a stranger sidles his cart up next to your in the frozen food aisle, touches you on the sleeve, and whispers softly (in a voice that could not possibly have come out of the Carolinas), "Guten Abend, Frau Gauleiter.  Wie geht es Ihnen?  Was neues?  Erinnern Sie sich mir?"  Wouldn't your heart jump into your throat?  Wouldn't you feel like screaming?  Can you really judge me for overreacting?

That's the story I sent her, to explain how I felt at Wife explaining to the boys what an outrageous academic overachiever I was back when I was an immature little snot.

But what does the story mean? If that's how I felt, ... then how exactly is it that I did feel? Like my achievements were something shameful? that they were hateful? that they were crimes against humanity? What does this story really say?

I don't know -- consciously -- exactly what the story means. I told it because it felt right. But now that I look back on it years later, I have to say that it looks like I was trying to say I felt that my academic achievements were a crime. That they burdened me with a terrible guilt. That they had to be expiated. That I had to be punished for being so goddamned smart and so insufferably good at the games schools make you play. That there was something deeply wicked and immoral about being the best student in my selective private prep school every year but my first, and again the best student in my intensely academic liberal arts college every year but my first. 

The. Best. In. Two. Excellent. Schools.

When I spell it out like that I can still feel a little twinge of pride in the accomplishment. But at the same time I feel ashamed of the pride, as if it soils me ... the way a really degrading sexual fetish might. As if the very fact that I can feel these twinges of pride just proves how depraved I am, how low and petty. As if pride in that achievement is the same thing as wallowing in the gutter, or masturbating in public.

I still feel like it is a crime. I don't resent being punished for it. In fact, maybe this is where I get my flirtation with Sister Failure ... as a door to redemption. Because if I fail badly enough, maybe I can escape the curse of so much early success.

I just don't understand why I think these things.

Narcissistic Personality Quiz

OK, this is just for fun on a Friday afternoon.  I found a quiz online which is supposed to determine whether you are a narcissist.

You can find it here: http://psychcentral.com/quizzes/narcissistic.htm 

Actually I found it a few days ago, but I keep re-taking it because keep getting scores that I can't believe.  Wait ... it's not what you think.

There are 40 questions.  I'm not sure, but I guess that each question scores either a 0 or a 1, depending on whether you choose the narcissistic answer or not.  Maybe it is more sophisticated than that.  In any event, what they say about the scoring is as follows:

Between 12 and 15 is average.
Celebrities often score closer to 18.
Narcissists score over 20.

Simple enough?  Sure.  I thought so too.  So when I first discovered the quiz I took a few minutes, whisked through the questions, and clicked the button to calculate a score.

I scored 4.

Wait, surely that's not possible.  Well I didn't worry about it then because I had other things to do that day (like work) but I came back a couple of days later and tried again.

This time I scored 3.

So just now I tried one more time, doing my level best to answer the questions as narcissistically as I could manage.  I thought of some of the screamingly narcissistic things I have written here, for example.  (This one still embarrasses me deeply.)  I tried to give myself whatever edge I thought I realistically could, given the way the questions were worded.

And this time I climbed all the way up to 7.  That's a full half of a "Normal" rating.

How is this possible?  Knowing how easily my ego can come untethered from reality, how can my score be so low?

I think it all has to do with the way the questions are worded, because many times I found myself conflicted about how to answer: my otherwise boundless egotism ran smack dab into my shyness and social fear.  So I made a point of agreeing with statements like "I am special" or "I am extraordinary."  I even tried to agree with the statements about being a natural leader, on the strength of the repeated experience that I cannot fade into the background ... that at every new job, people who are introduced to me for the first time say, "Oh, so you're Hosea! I've heard so much about you!"  But then there were all these questions about whether I like to show off my body, or whether I can make anybody believe anything I want them to believe, or whether I actually enjoy being praised in front of a crowd of others.  And the answers to all those are consistently No, No, and No.  I can't avoid public attention, but it embarrasses me.  I can't stop myself from from "laying down the law with elegant insolence" [as Dorothy Sayers once wrote about Peter Wimsey] in areas that I know something about, but I almost refuse to have an opinion about anything else for fear of looking like a loud-mouthed ignorant boor.  And showing off my body?  Well I gave myself points for liking to look at myself in a mirror -- anything to boost my score up towards average -- but I don't pretend that other people notice me one way or another, or want to.  As far as I can tell, I'm kind of average-looking.  Maybe a little taller than average, but not by much.

So don't mistake my low score for indicating any kind of special virtue.  It's just that one set of vices are held in check by another.  Of course, I guess that's not all bad.  At least something holds them in check.

Anyway, it was fun.
   

County fair

Yesterday I found myself shutting off the energy that I had been putting into my interactions with Hil, as if at a spigot.  I would have to have anyway, sooner or later, so it was only a matter of time.

I knew I would reach this point some day because we never had a lot to talk about besides work.  We'd tell some stories about our kids, but I never felt a clear opening to talk about something else.  Maybe it was partly the language difference: her English is very good, for that of a non-native speaker, but she still stumbles over things that are outside of her normal range of discussion.  Also, ... I don't know, call it a sense.  She loves coming to the United States on business trips because the exchange rate between euro and dollar is so favorable to Europeans, and our sales tax is much lower than in her stores back home, so she goes on shopping binges whenever she is here.  She always visits whatever Disney Store she can find in town and buys it out of anything she doesn't already have ... "to bring home for my girls."  Shopping?  The Disney Store?  Really, this is your idea of recreation?  So yeah, I never really thought it would be a good idea to bring up Plato or Thích Nhất Hạnh.  It did restrict the number of things we had in common to talk about.  (Whatever else can be said about them, D and Debbie conversed with me far more easily. Hell, so did Wife way back in the day before we started hating each other.)

She ran into another of my crotchets Thursday night at dinner, when she suddenly asked "Why did they put salami in this salad?"  It was a cheap Italian restaurant, so hell -- maybe they thought it was antipasto-like.  It's not like Hil is a vegetarian.  So she systematically picked out every single little bitty scrap of salami before continuing.  OK, she's a grown-up and it's her salad -- her division is paying for it -- but it won't surprise you to hear that I looked at her fussiness a little askance.  You have to be that picky?  Really?  [Readers are within their rights to point out that I'm being, in some ways, just as picky -- only at the level of scorning human beings instead of salami. I never promised to be consistent.]

What really struck me, though, was Friday, when we wrapped up early at work and decided to visit the County Fair that was going on in Sticksville at the time.  Parts of it were really interesting: they had a "Village of Yesteryear" area where the local historical society had reconstructed several buildings to resemble how they looked in the nineteenth century.  (It was scary to realize that nearly every building we walked into had "old-time" tools from long ago which exactly resembled stuff of Wife's we had packed out of the garage or the storage unit.)  She was also really interested in the model trailer homes they had on display: they were far larger, far more luxurious, and far cheaper than anything available in Germany.  (I could gladly have skipped checking out the trailer homes, but what the hell -- I went along to be gracious.)  And she nodded seriously when we strolled through the barns, looking at the prize cows and llamas, and then told me about the farm her granparents lived on while adding that there are virtually none of these farms left in Germany any more because they are no longer economically viable.  So far, so good.

Then we turned down the midway, towards the campier parts of the fair.  There was the Mr. Lumberjack competition, where a couple of muscular guys in blue jeans raced around an obstacle course while carrying chain saws and sawing off branches here and there: she explained very seriously that if you want to operate a chain saw in Germany -- at any rate in the public forests (to get firewood for the winter) -- you have to register with the local forest manager and pass a practical test in chain saw safety before you are issued a certificate permitting you to use the damned thing.  There were the food stands selling deep-fried pickles, deep-fried nacho-flavored cheese curds, deep-fried cookies, deep-fried cheesecake.  Other stands sold kettle corn, cotton candy, or "Corn ... dogs? Did I read that right? What's a ... corn ... dog?"  There were stands selling black T-shirts with designs all in glitter, hats advertising beer companies, and elaborate decorative wall hangings celebrating "The Second Amendment: America's FIRST Homeland Security!"  (I don't think she saw the hanging, or understood it. Fortunately I didn't have to explain it. She's already told me plenty about Germany's handgun laws.)*

Probably I was tired.  It had been a long week.  But it felt to me like the look on her face was turning from anthropological curiosity into scorn; and I felt ashamed.  It's not even like it had anything to do with me: county fairs aren't exactly my thing, and I wasn't the one who had suggested we go.  It's just that it's my country, and I felt somehow like we were all found wanting.

In retrospect it's very likely I was reading it all in.  It's very likely that she may have been puzzled but wasn't really scornful.  It's very likely I was just tired and grumpy.  But one way or another I let those feelings turn off the spigot of energy I had been putting into our interactions.  It would have happened anyway.  This was just how it came about.

__________
* I have no intention of entering a discussion about the pros and cons of handguns just now, though long-time readers will remember this is one of Wife's hot buttons.  I mention the topic only to give a sense of what this part of the fair was like as an ambience.    

What is money for?, 2: fear of beauty

A little while after I wrote the post two weeks ago about what money is for, I began to feel uncomfortable because it sounded too confident.  Not that there is anything false about it as it stands, but just that it doesn't make clear how recently I came to these conclusions.  But there were many, many years before when I was a lot more lost around money.

I've already alluded to this in other posts, like this one.  But really my confusion went back a long time.  On the one hand, I adopted an air of magnanimity in paying things for other people: the idea was to be able to wave my hand in a relaxed but dismissive gesture while saying, "It's not a problem."  And in truth I very much thought about money (when spending it on others) in terms of this little theatrical gesture, far more than thinking about it in terms of (say) arithmetic.  I wanted to be able to look unconcerned.  I think I learned the gesture from my father, and I copied it carefully.

On the other hand I avoided spending money on myself if I could at all help it.  But even here I wasn't completely consistent.  I didn't mind buying myself snacks, for example.  But when it came to buying something more substantial, I would deliberately choose the least expensive thing I could find rather than buying something I liked.  In fact I adopted a habit of deliberately overlooking what I wanted, in order to spend out of necessity instead of pleasure.  I remember once I was buying a telephone for my apartment, and I specifically asked if they had one in black.  I didn't want black; I didn't think I would enjoy black.  What I thought was that it would be appropriate because it was so basic, because if I had a black phone then nobody could think that I was buying things for frivolous reasons like the pleasure they might bring me.  If black was good enough for the Model-T, it should be good enough for me.  Really, my attitude towards myself was almost punitive.  (In fact they didn't have black so I settled for beige, which I enjoyed a lot more.)

In some cases I chose practicality over aesthetics in order to make a point, but it was still about creating an identity for myself -- an austere and intellectual one.  One Christmas my father asked me what I wanted and I suggested a calendar would be useful.  He got me a "calendar" that was a long poster of a naked girl stretched out on a sand dune, with the twelve months listed at the bottom in small type and a string of numbers 1 to 30 (or 31) underneath each one.  Right.  A calendar.  I refused the present, saying that it was no use to me because I needed something that had boxes in it where I could list upcoming events or deadlines so I wouldn't forget them.  But there was more to my refusal than that.  I resented what appeared to me to be my father's overt attempt to pander to me, to offer me something that was more or less pornographic (no matter how artistically done), to try to excite some kind of desire in me.  His seeming need to stand in the role of a procurer for his own son just disgusted me.  And so there was no way I could possibly have accepted the calendar.  At the time, though, I was not sufficiently self-aware to articulate all these reasons that I hated it so much.  So I jumped on the one reason that I could articulate and that I felt comfortable saying aloud: the calendar was impractical.  And I made other choices, step-by-step, to re-enforce my identity as someone who would turn down such a poster on the grounds of practicality.  I chose to have things around me that were useful rather than beautiful.

I was also afraid that my own taste in what was beautiful might be childish or shallow, that I would expose myself to ridicule by saying "I like this, I find it lovely."  I knew that back when I was a kid I had liked certain kinds of designs, but they were the kinds of designs associated with the fantasy or science fiction subcultures, or with the hippie friends of my parents back in the 1960s.  As a college student in the late 70s or a young adult in the early 80s, could I still have such tastes?  Or would I do better just to abjure beauty altogether?  In the event, that's what I did.

In fact, I realize that I took this fear of beauty to extremes.  My girlfriend in college was not beautiful: she had sharp features (particularly a sharp chin) and she often pulled her hair back tight on her head to look "severe".  (When she would let her hair fall loose and let herself smile, she softened the effect considerably.)  [Update years later: This was Marie, in case you were wondering.] And then Wife, when I met her, wasn't especially pretty either.  Oh, her face was pretty enough, but even then she was heavy enough to have a visible belly.  I don't mean just that she had some gentle cushioning around the edges (which I find quite attractive in a woman); she was fat.  But during the ramp-up to my decision to propose to her, I consciously told myself that my awareness of her physical looks could have nothing to do with her value as a person.  

I seem to have wandered a long way from my theme: I started out talking about money, and ended up talking about beauty.  This may be indicative of how confusing I found money for so many years, however: I made financial decisions based on non-financial reasons, assuming that somehow the money would work itself out; and I denied myself the things I enjoyed, as a point of principle.  Then of course after I was married I found that I had to think hard about how we spent our money (because Wife wasn't about to exert any self-control), and I also found that she self-denial which had become so natural to me was something I could never sell to Wife at all.  So I resorted to shouting and screaming, which seemed to be the only argument she could hear.

So far from learning to think about money more intelligently, this last development simply covered my earlier confusion with a thick layer of emotion and anxiety.  It didn't help me get any better clarity.  And there I sat, until -- decades later -- my affair with D and my progressive distancing from Wife allowed me to experiment a little bit with spending money on myself.  And then I started to look at the whole question a little more coolly.  It has been an improvement ....

Why so upset?

Last night I got a text from Wife that she had gotten a call from Father that our storage unit was threatening to impound our stuff for non-payment of rent.  I’d written the check and mailed it a month ago, so this made no sense; but I called my dad and he read me a card that said exactly that.  This was crazy, so I called the storage unit from my hotel room (I was still in Weather City at the time), got their answering machine, and practically shouted into the phone.  Then I went back to packing, but rehearsed angry speeches to myself for at least an hour afterwards.

Why?  Specifically, why was I so upset?  It’s not like there was anything I could do about it till today anyway.  And I’m flying home today, so in reality it’s not like I can do anything until I get home: I plainly can’t call to yell at them while I’m on the airplane.  And why in fact do I even want to yell at them?  I logged into my bank account on-line, and the check hasn’t been cashed, so it’s not like they mistakenly applied it to somebody else.  But the checks on either side of it – all written and mailed the same day – have been cashed, so it’s not like the Post Office went on strike.  And no business in the world would refuse to cash a check on purpose just to cause a problem for me personally, so it has to be some kind of mistake.  Why was I so upset?

Partly I can still get triggered when Wife accuses me of something: “You said you already paid them through the end of this month! [As if I hadn’t.]  And now if they aren’t paid by July 3 they’ll block our access to the unit and I’ll lose all my things! [As if I hadn’t already told her I was going to empty it this coming weekend.]”  The feeling that I am being accused of negligence or lying hits me somewhere very sensitive and I respond with anger; when the accusation comes from Wife, to whom I am already allergic, it’s like fingernails on a blackboard.

Partly it’s that I felt blindsided.  I really had written the damned check a month ago.  And why was this news coming to me from my parents, for God’s sake?  I felt blindsided, or trapped somehow in a net that made no sense at all.  So I felt panic anf this came out – again – as anger.

I suspect those two factors are the reason: feeling accused and feeling blindsided, feeling trapped in a situation that makes no sense and with no warning.  It’s better today.  I’m embarrassed at having lost it last night, at having shouted at the storage unit’s answering machine.  I’ll drive over there when I get home, and try to straighten it out.

Meanwhile, I guess the moral is that a year of meditation doesn’t stop me from getting angry, nor from taking myself by surprise when I do.

Spiritual exercises?

We've all heard the term "spiritual exercises, but last night or the night before I suddenly had an idea that helped me understand what they really must be.  It's something I remembered from when I was a kid.

To back up, then ....  When I was young – eight, nine, ten, eleven, around there – every so often I would find myself thinking of very sad things as I fell asleep at night.  Hang on, that doesn't begin to explain what I'm trying to say.  Let me try again.  It's more like there were these story-lines that I would make up in my head, really elaborate fantasies that went on and on, and I would tell myself these stories as I went to sleep.  (To be strictly accurate, back then I was telling myself story-lines of this kind most of the day too.)  Some of them were melancholy – melodramatic – maudlin – to the point where I would quite literally cry myself to sleep.  And yet you have to remember I was living a safe, secure, middle-class life in the suburbs of a safe, secure city.  I didn't have any relatives die during that time, no catastrophes befell the family, there was nothing external to provoke such anguish.  It was more the sheer love of the story itself.  I would indulge in these stories the way some people love tragedy, or horror movies.  There was something pleasurable, in a lurid, squalid, debauched kind of way, in the heavily overdone tragic fantasies I would tell myself.  And of course they were all completely self-centered: one of them was about imagining myself having died, and then imagining how inconsolably wretched everyone else would (naturally!) be at my death.  The others were similar.  That is to say, they would have been terrible as literature and I could never have told them to anybody else.  But so long as fantasies aren't expected to be any more than a guilty pleasure that pander to deep and unspeakable desires, they filled the bill just fine.

In retrospect maybe this was all a symptom of my later depression, showing up early.  I didn't have a name for it then.  But in any event one of these story-lines was a fantasy that I had somehow been dragged before a tribunal of some kind and they were making public all the secrets I had tried to keep from the world all my life.  You know that privacy has always been a big deal for me.  See, for example, any of my posts about my relationship with my dad over the years.  So this particular story-line struck me hard, and was good for a whole night of weeping until I drifted off to sleep.

But over the years something interesting happened.  The story began to lose its hold on me.  Specifically, I began to fantasize myself standing up to the tribunal (heroically, of course) to tell them, in effect,

So what? You've collected all of these secrets of mine and you are publishing them to the world, somehow using them to accuse me of something. But there's nothing in here that you couldn't say about everybody else in the world, too. Here I was weak or unethical? There I was sexually aroused over the wrong person? Somewhere else I was cruel or petty or spiteful or just plain mean? I'm sure I was. And I'm sure that each of you judges have had times in your life when you were just as weak or unethical or spiteful or inappropriate. And the same goes for the audience, too, who are all listening and being shocked at how bad I am. It's all true of you too, or something just like it.

What's the result?  Well it didn't make my relationship with my chronically-prying father any better.  But over the very long haul – years and years – it helped me finally to desensitize myself to that stimulus, just a bit.  It helped me to relax and stop clinging to my privacy quite as compulsively.  And that has been a good thing.

At some level I suppose I knew this all along ... at any rate I lived through it so I probably had some awareness of the progress over time.  But it wasn't until just one or two nights ago that I realized: Those fantasies functioned like a spiritual exercise.  They weren't as focussed as a true exercise would have been, because I wasn't using them for a purpose.  I got way too much depraved pleasure out of them for that.  But even so, they moved me in a direction where something that had been a big deal became less of one.  It was progress.  And so I think in a sense they count.  It's an interesting thought.

I'm offline as I write this, or I'd look up my post about when Ender spoke the death of Marcão and link to it here.  I'm talking about the same kind of freedom.

Visiting home: anxiety and shame

A couple of minutes ago I wrote a post about visiting my parents yesterday.  Originally I meant to make it a post about dealing with difficult emotions.  But ironically, the difficult emotions I had in mind weren't any of the ones you might have expected.  They weren't related to my father's impending mortality, nor to our having to plan what to do when they both die, nor yet to my father's current sickness, nor even to my frustration at my father's damned foolishness in (more or less) inviting his current condition by his reckless disregard for his own health.

 

No, the difficult emotions I had in mind are the kinds of emotions that my dad often triggers in me, feelings of shame and anxiety that are so basic to my experience of him that in all frankness I will feel relieved when he dies.  Sometimes it feels as if I have lived my life in the shadow of two bullies, or at any rate figures I have allowed to bully me: Wife and my father.  I'm getting rid of one of them (sorry, "separating" from her) and so I can start looking forward to the time when I'll be rid of the other as well.  The only question after that is whether they are really the problem, or whether it is just that I have learned to live in such a timid, cowering way that I will simply replace them with others when they are gone.  After my affair with D (another just like them) I began to worry that this pattern looked pretty solid.  Being with Debbie helped relax my fears a bit, because she was nothing like the three of them, but even there I think I carried over some bad habits.

 

But what am I talking about in particular?

 

I feel anxious when I'm around him, particularly if nobody else is around.  He always wants to talk to me, he clings, he comes at me wherever I am.  Sometimes I can hold off the anxiety by drinking, the same way I used to do with Wife.  Once drunk, I can feel confident enough to shove the conversation over onto some neutral topic, like politics or history.  We can argue long and loud about dead English kings, or about movies.  My dad loves these conversations (he's always drinking too, during them, generally a good bit more than I am) and will get nostalgic about them if I come visit some time and stay sober ... because when sober, I generally avoid him or am at best diffident.  "Why can't we just sit down and talk, like we used to?" or "like the last time you were here?"  I don't try to say "Because I don't enjoy it" ... because how can I claim that when my actions appear to contradict me?  Wasn't I having a good time the last time we talked for hours?  Well, maybe not but I probably appeared to be ... and my father is perfectly willing to tell me (in effect) that he knows better than I how I feel, if he thinks he has a shred of evidence to prove him "right".

 

I feel more anxious if the conversation swerves back to the personal.  In the middle of a vague discussion about how to dispose of my parents' stuff after they both die, my father suddenly asked, "If it's not too personal a question, are you and Debbie going to move in together?"  Of course he doesn't know that we're not even seeing each other, because I have told no-one except my therapist and you.  But why the hell does it matter?  I pooh-poohed the idea with, "You seem to think I lead a much more interesting life than I really do," and added that I'm happy to live in an apartment because it is so much less work to take care of than a house.  This time, that was enough to save me – Brother chimed in, thank God!, with a joke about my leading a boring life (it's a running joke in our family) and we moved on.  But there have been times when Father starts pressing me with questions that are more personal than that, and then when I don't answer or try to change the subject he has the nerve to get offended!  "Well what's the god-damned secret, anyway? I'm just trying to be friendly, just trying to share your life. What the hell's wrong with you that you have to be so god-damned hostile to me all the time?"  Gosh, Dad.  I don't know what to say.

 

We didn't have one of those confrontations yesterday.  As I say, Brother – bless him! – intervened with a joke and got us back on track.  But later in the day Father told a story about me than always makes me squirm with shame.  Now fortunately it was just the four of us there, so everyone had heard the story a hundred times before.  It's not like it was anything new to anybody.  But the story itself is very difficult for me.

 

What happened is this:  back when I was in sixth grade, my father and I were in a play together.  We drove to the theater in the evenings for performances, and then we drove back in the night when it was over.  And we talked quite a lot during these drives.  I was ten, and I still trusted him and thought the world of him.  Now this play was running concurrently with another one, so the backstage was jammed with props for both.  And one of the props for the other play was a cheap pornographic paperback "with all the dirty parts underlined in red."  (That's in quotes because it was a line from the play; but in fact someone had done exactly that because at one point one of the characters picks it up and starts reading out loud at random ... and this way he could look for the red underlining and know where to start reading.)  My part was a small one so I had a lot of time on my hands backstage and I didn't usually have homework from school.  So naturally I picked the book up and started reading it.  I was only ten, so I hadn't hit puberty yet.  It's not like I could have masturbated successfully if I had wanted to.  But I know I got hard reading it ... sometimes I was late changing into my costume because I had to wait for my dick to relax before I dared go into the dressing room to undress.

 

On at least one occasion – I forget if it happened more than once – I described the inane plot to my father on our drive home.  Of course the plot was inane: it was a porno, for God's sake, and the only point of what passed for a plot was to give the characters an excuse for disporting their body parts in as many different ways as possible.  I remember we both laughed over how stupid it was.  What I don't remember is whether I said anything else.  I don't remember if I admitted getting hard.  I don't remember if I admitted that I got hard enough it was a problem for me to change into my costume.  I don't remember any of that, and of course I fear that I might have.

 

So late yesterday afternoon my dad started telling this story.  I keep hoping he will forget large chunks of it, but no such luck: he remembered details of the inane plot that I didn't remember before he started telling the story again.  He told it as if this were a recurring conversation: "you used to tell me all about this book."  And as he went on I just got quiet and drank my coffee.  Actually my coffee cup was long since empty, but I stared at it and tried to drain it some more anyway.  And I waited through until he was done.  He seems really to enjoy this story.  I can't tell whether he can tell how very uncomfortable it always makes me (in which case I would have to conclude that he tells it on purpose to make me squirm), or whether he is completely oblivious to that part and just sees it as more evidence that we "used to be really close" ... so what the hell is wrong with me that I won't confide in him any more?  I have no idea what goes through his head.

 

Incidentally, he has never (in my hearing) told the story in such a way as to say clearly out loud that I got hard at this stupid book.  Maybe I never told him that part.  Or maybe he gets a thrill from seeing how close he can skate to the edge without quite going there.  I don't know which it is.

 

So that's the difficult emotion I found myself having to deal with.  I tried to sit with it on the drive home.  I sat with it some more during my meditation this morning.  I don't know if sitting with it did any good, or indeed what "doing any good" would look like in this case.  I don't suppose I will ever stop squirming with shame at the story, although objectively spoken I suppose that it's pretty mild as shameful stories go.  (I see now that I write it down – and I have left nothing out.)  I did realize this morning that when I tried to asses what the emotion felt like physically it came out feeling not very different from any other kind of anxiety that I ever feel.  So maybe it's just the story that makes it so intense for me.  Probably it is.  But I wish it didn't have such power over me.  I wish I could just yawn and write it off, like so many of Father's other stories that he repeats hundreds of times.

 

Oh well.  Some day he'll die.