What's Stopping You?

 Idea for a setting:

it turns out that What are commonly thought of as mysterious forces from beyond, are the survivors of some future apocalyptic war, who somehow managed to reset the clock, and now the remaining factions are meddling, trying to prevent their own worst fears from coming to pass. 

First, the protagonist discovers that there are mysterious and extra dimensional beings who are looking down upon the world, very much like that TV show with the parallel worlds and the walternate, whose name I can't remember just now. 

Later, he will discover that there are factions. Yes, I'm defaulting to a male POV. I am One, and it won't distract from the first draft. 

Later, he discovers there are factions. And of course neither faction wants to tell you what their goals are, because they've learned not to trust. That's what happens, when you start treating politics like a chess board. So the protagonist learning the third different fractions, with different agendas. Orthogonal agendas, Not in opposition to each other, but often with adjacent agendas in the same situation. 


Oooh. Because these surviving functions are from different futures. And each future faction, in the beginning, picked a single point of history, and twisted it. Nudged it. Instead of sending a report, the captain inspires a lieutenant with an offhand remark. A slight delay Will cause him to miss the bus. All those futures, reaching back from their branching timelines, attempting to exert pressure on the same person, in the same minute. 

And the moment Tipped in the direction no one finger was pushing. Then each future grabbed clumsly for whatever steering holds they could find within reach. Every one of them tugging even more. This is before they knew about each other. This is how they found out about each other.. Only ever seeing the footprints of the other factions. Maybe there's some sort of universal law of time traveling that prevents the same person from different futures seeing themselves. 

That's why we need the protagonist. He's from now, he never gets to travel. Not that anyone would want him to see what their world has become. 

One group could be a rebel movement within a totalitarian regime. Another group, several groups, could be the survivors of a post-apocalyptic landscape. Some sort of weird planet of the apes variation, with my samurai Bearcats and geisha catbears. 

I mean, you might as well make It all a big story hidden inside some animalkin manga setting. Makes the factions easier to identify, if they're all different animals. Kings of what's left of the jungle. 

Which really makes the entire thing just a sequel to 12 Monkeys. Although my Bollywood heritage certainly doesn't let me shy away from the prospect of stealing a decent plot.

 So, after three days in a car, taking very short, 4 hour hops, I got into a car accident less than an hour away from Fusion. After all the paperwork is done, and the car gets deemed drivable, I have arrived at The Thing! I have made A Plan. I have Planned It.

And the Gods are already snickering, eager to show me who I am in the face of everything I know about myself

They start with a simple play. The girl right in front of me in line at the register is a redhead, pale as an Angel, the perfect complexion. She.....

Fuck this. Chronological coherence is for losers.

The redhead in body hugging spandex, bent forward, her curves swaying in the wind, the swab making slow circles in her nose like a cock in the delicate O of her mouth. And I think the gods are whispering to me, "we know what turns you on."

But they are actually saying, "you have grown, old man," and I just haven't heard them properly yet.

Scuddle, swinging from my burgundy rope, their face in a familiar beautiful agony, to the beat of The Rhythm. Ronin, locking eyes with me as we pull her legs further apart, the wicked glint in his eyes, calling to trickster in me. Oh, gods, The Rhythm. The beat of my heart, the pulse in my throat. The rope in my hands, not some foreign object I barely remember, but once again my truest self, my 6mm tentacles reaching out into the world and calling it beautiful. 

I. 
AM.
ME.
AGAIN.

It's like a fog lifting from the dreary weight of my world.

Dining hall patio, a trek across unfamiliar terrain, the strange chastity play of covid precautions proving oddly delightful in its symphony of denied pleasures and potential friends. Everywhere I look, there is something to look at.  And she sits next to me, contemplating a slice of watermelon. He sits across from me, describing his story. They sit across from me, a break on their long journeys home, and it is The Rhythm all over again. It is the sound of my own beating heart inside another.

(the taste of her neck in my mouth, at last)

I am me again, as I sit across from a lost lamb, returning to the flock. As I maintain eye contact with the submerged beauty and talk about how It Is Okay To Like Stuff. Someone whose name probably begins with a Z shoves her thong-stretched butt in my chlorine-drenched face and calls me neighbor (we talk about vaginal leakage and menopause and erectile dysfunction). And oh gods, there is so much of me. I am infinities once again, tethered by rope and common cause and individuality.

I am lying in Pavillion, listening to 80s rock as the night dies down and everyone else goes to bed. I am walking in the dark, looking for Labyrinths and Mazes. I find the fire and drums instead, and though I am vaguely aware that I have walked much farther than I should, I dance at the fire and I step to The Rhythm until I nearly pass out.

( I'm so tired / And I don't know what to do/ I'm soooo tired / My mind is set on you )

I will pay for this the next day, in front of Sprocket and everyone. But even inside this, there is a lesson.

I tell Maze that the lesson of 2023 is that Asking For Help Is Hard, But Worth It, and she drops her the thing in her hand, and asks, "How did I know that."

I tell the pair at the corner, and one of them says, "I love that everyone understands." And I say, You're Not Alone, and the thunder rumbles that this, too, is a lesson I need to learn.

Peaches finds me a bowl to make popcorn in. Thistle and Beau make me a cup of tea. Hannah holds space for me as I cry and try to remember where the goddamn Dining Hall is.

You Are Not Alone.

And Jim died just a few weeks ago, and Melissa keeps checking in on me over text, because it doesn't matter that I only met him once. It doesn't matter that she didn't even speak to me. It doesn't matter that people are coming into the cabin and I'm not talking to them, it doesn't matter that there are people at camp I haven't met yet, it doesn't matter that I'm out of practice at tying knots above my head, it doesn't matter because....

Because....?

Because Trust Is Given, Not Earned.

And trusting someone means trusting in the things they tell me.

And the hail rolls in as I pack my gear. I hide in my car, stuffy and hot and dry, and Haedonis is perched on a stump, letting it all wash over him. The hails comes, and I laugh, my brain cracked, my soul wrenched open. To not do things because the weather isn't good enough, is to wait until the waves stop before swimming in the ocean. 

I am stronger than I give myself credit for. Weaker than I am willing to admit.  Asking for help is a skill. I am still ME, this is just a different body.

The hail pelts my face, my arms fling open wide, a cooler in one hand and a rolled carpet in another. I sing out to the world,

Oh, I'm a believer

I couldn't leave her if I tried.

A long long time ago, I met the first girl that I ever fell in love with, my Priceless Pearl, and she had an uncle who was a pretty horrible person.

I held space for her on the phone for many nights, as she processed the things he did to her and her cousin (his daughter) before they both "aged out" of his preferred demographic. Before my first kiss, I was taught, in pretty particular detail, exactly how a man can be horrible to a girl.....

Even to this day, it's hard for me to talk about this without getting lost in the things he did to her. The things he made her watch him do to his own daughter.


My entire sexual adolescence, I felt like I was banging against this wall made of time, wishing I could go back and stop him. And because she was so fucked up by him, because she had trusted me with these awful truths, we never dated. Oh, sure, there were moments of intimacy, of exploration, but I was never Hers. She was never Mine. But we were very good friends.

We were such good friends that both of our first spouses were intimidated by, and jealous of, our connection. When I told my ex-wife that I was done trying to save our relationship, the first thing she said to me was, "She's never going to date you." And when my best friend had the same marriage-ending fight, he said to Pearl, "Well, I guess now you can go date [amul] now, that's what you've always wanted, anyway."

-- This is kind of a tangent from what's on my mind, but at some point in high school, I went to one of my teachers to ask for advice, and he basically told me that there was nothing I could do, because I lived so far away, because it was all hearsay from her.

Two years ago, that man, the one I asked for advice from, that childhood mentor of mine, was accused by over 40 men of grooming and sexually assaulting them over the last 50 years.

I'm still processing that. --

But anyway, about a decade ago, her uncle died, and she called me to and asked me to hold space for her, as I had done long ago, so she could process her feelings about the death. I'd been there, after all. I wouldn't interrupt her with questions trying to follow the plot, the players, the tangled sordid mess of violence.

And as Pearl was talking, she..... She talked like an adult talks about the sexual gratification of others. What he was doing, not just what she remembered feeling. In even more specific detail. Shit that haunts her even to this day.

Shit that, perhaps predictably, formed a lot of the basis of my kinks. So much of my sexuality has been about proving that I'm not him.

And then she told me that he had not stopped, as she had previously maintained, when she turned 12. That he'd been doing it until she moved out.

That he'd been raping her all throughout high school.


I've spent a lot of the last decade kind of scrawling notes in the margins of my autobiography. Those last minute cancellations. Those phone calls when she was "inexplicably" recalling traumas from her grade school years.

And it was hard, because she lied to me, and it was hard because I had spent so much of that time wishing I could stop him and I could have stopped him but I didn't know.

She didn't tell me.


We stopped talking for a while after that. Pretty much most of the last decade. But then another one of the monsters from her childhood died last year, and she called, and I held space for her. I opened the book inside my mind that I had shut away, and once again I remembered names and habits and terrors that I had let myself forget.

Pearl spent so much of that call trying to apologize for putting that burden on me, and I kept telling her that she wasn't the one who put that burden on me.

But here's the thing. The thing I realized that night. The perspective shift she blessed me with.

See, I called her all the time, back in high school. Pretty much every night, right after dinner. 8pm.

And when I was on the phone with her, she wasn't alone.

She wasn't anywhere that she could be trapped.


All this time, all the decades that I've spent wishing I could go back in time and stop him, wishing I had known it was still going on so I could stop it. That entire time.


I was protecting her, after all.

-----

My last romantic partner, when we broke up, described my interest in power exchange and consent, in dd/lg stuff, she called all of that "disgusting patriarchal bullshit," and that my desire to save the women I sleeping with was "toxically masculine." 

I can't get a handle on that bit, because I do have this deep unfilled hunger to feel like I'm protecting the people I love. I just don't think it's "toxically male," because it's a trauma response, not some certainty of innate superiority. Because there WAS someone who needed saving, and I loved her.

Don't get me wrong, my savior complex was out of control in my 20s, but I feel like I've got it under control now, and I have fashioned that pain into opportunities for vulnerability. 

I think we're all formed by our traumas, and what should matter is how effectively we turn those traumas into tools.

But during the conversation that led to me end that relationship, she told me that she'd always seen this part of me, always found it disgusting, and the reason she'd kept things casual between us, it wasn't the politics like I had thought, it was because she didn't want to show me any part of herself that I might want to save.

That this is why, when she found herself dating an abuser, she didn't tell me until after the relationship was "over." Why, when she invited her "ex" to move in with her, and that turned out to be exactly as disastrous as I worried, she never reached out to me for any kind of support.

It isn't that there's some little kid inside me whose upset that he couldn't relive that haunting tale, it's that I was AM a man who has studied and fought against sexual and domestic violence for thirty years, and this woman whom I cared about ignored avoided my experience and academic knowledge, because I lived through trauma.


I lived through trauma.

When he did those things to those girls, he traumatized me too.

That's a hard thing to acknowledge, because I never met him. Because they "really" happened to her. Because I'm a boy.

Hello, and thanks for reading my journal.

My old LJ account maintained several filters in the interest of internet environmentalism that may affect older entries. These include:

• a [meme] filter, which is where I post all the quizes, Name Ten Things About Joe games, etc, etc.
  
• a [sex]ually explicit filter, so that those who don't wish to see such things can avoid them
  
• A [fiction] and creativity filter, so that those who wish to see my non-photographic art attempts can do so without making the rest of you suffer.
  
• An [IsChicago] filter, for when I'm trying to abuse the LJ system for event planing and whatnot
  
  

These filters are designed for your benefit, not mine, and you are free to adjust your viewing experience of my life to your comfort level. Just let me know. I promise not to take it personally.

All comments to this post are screened, to enhance the privacy of your requests.

Excerpt from a conversation elsewhere:

For some reason, I'm reminded of Julie, the white girl in my high school who was dating an Indian guy who attended my dad's temple stuff. They broke up when he went off to college, and Julie ended up going to my college two years ahead of me. When I got there, she was in charge of the Indian Cultural club.

It was weird, looking back on it. In order for her to publicly date the guy I knew, she had to go all-in on learning Indian culture, including how to be pleasing to a mother. I think she started dating him when she was a freshman and he was a sophomore, so that was her formative dating experience.


> And also a little appropriate to then lead the Indian Cultural Club.


Well, like, it was a bit clingy, you know? And this was in the early 90s, when Indians weren't a large enough population here to really see these kinds of things done before. I know her interest in Indian culture was genuine, but also stemmed from a high school romance that ended several years earlier.

Was it still appropriation?

Mail packages
Renew vehicle stuff
Pay bills
Mop

***TO DO LATER***
Hem curtains
Wash curtains
Buy rose rug
Shop online for CPAP stuff.
Build spacers for toy drawer
- Measure drawer
- Fix drawer
- Design spacers
- cut matboard

***DONE***
Deposit checks
Framing wire for Nick
Groceries
Bake con food
Pack toys
Pack clothes
Pack toiletries
Get printer from studio.

There are four hairs on my face that I can never seem to catch, each time I shave. I notice them, hours later, and make my slow and distracted way back to the bathroom.

I must touch my face, subconsciously caressing my cheek, my fingers verifying the completion of a task I continually miss. I assume that I touch my face all the time, and that it only seems like I always miss those four hairs because I only notice when my fingers find them. There must be other times when my fingers seek, and do not find.

So, I get up, first by completing whatever task I am currently set to, complete it sufficiently to pause. My feet have uncurled from around my desk chair by now, and already have begun to seek my slippers, proof against the cold hardwood floor. In this moment, I will recall the great lengths, the decades, the effort it has cost my friends, to leave my feet unshod while I work. I will recall a jacket I had once forgotten I owned, to the great amusement of many.

Distracted by reverie, I will wander aimlessly the seven steps into my kitchen, decide that I did not get up because I was hungry, and then consider seriously if I have forgotten that I needed to pee. Seven steps, like the seven steps taken in marriage, each foot marking a duty between husband and wife. I will know that I do not need to pee, but believe that movement feels good, and so I will walk to the bathroom.

I will check, along the way, to see if I have left my bedroom light on. If I have made my bed. I will consider seriously if I have the moral fortitude to make my bed, and in so considering, must, perforce, consider the kitchen counter and the number of dirty dishes upon it.

This state of mental purity cleanly assessed, I will enter the bathroom and sit on the toilet. There, I will check my social media sites until I recall that I did not enter the bathroom to pee.

Rising from that porcelain throne, I shall reach for my electric razor, and consider my face and neck. I will scrutinize the areas that I typically miss: the bottom hairs on my neck, the two far edges on the side where I nearly always miss, no matter how diligently I work the first time. And only then do I consider those four hairs upon my right cheek.

I will stare at them, and remember Rebecca, who first pointed them out to me when I was 18. Back then, I did not actually look at my face after I shaved. I used a cream and razor, and assumed the job was done when the cream was off my face. It was not until someone who loved me romantically looked at my face that I understood the point of shaving.

You see, I do not touch my cheek because I cannot remember the last time anyone did. I do it because of those four hairs, whatever my heart may believe.

I've been running this rpg group for about 3 years now. When it started, I was specifically looking for reliability over personal connection, because at that point in my life I was always traveling and my closest friends were just as unreliable as I was. So it was acquaintances that I knew were into rpgs.

At some point in the last year, maybe, we all seem to be turning into friends, and honestly, I have no idea what to do with that. What do you even DO with friends who live in the same city as you and have the option of seeing each other regularly? Like, do you talk to them? How?

I saw this meme a bit ago about how guys are often raised to think of their romantic partners as the only people they can confide in, and I think there's some of that going on here.

...running late for a thing. More later, perhaps.

I've been struggling for over a year now with finding a good BDSM "practice partner." I'm clearly not ready to pursue a more sexually or emotionally intimate relationship, but this necessarily means that anyone I reach out to for bondage practice is going to be less than ideal. This means that it becomes a tradeoff, that I need to calculate the opportunity cost of working with one person over another.

One person who has expressed interest lives fairly far away. It's about a one hour drive. She also has several of my big ticket No's: she's married to a monogamously-oriented kink-shaming partner with major jealousy issues. On the other hand, she's been as reliable as she can be, given that her partner will sometimes demand she cancel our plans in a jealous fit. She's been sensitive to the geographical issues, and has suggested a variety of ways to add value to the time I spend way out in her suburb. There are a lot of negatives, but ultimately, I think the opportunity nets positive for me.

Reliability is the major virtue for me here. There are several other people who say they want to tie with me, claim they're open to exploring sexual elements in due time, don't have to contend with jealousy issues, but....they don't actually show up. They disappear on me for months and then pop back up and act like the plans they were so excited about six months ago are still somehow a current conversation.

There's also a two or three people who seem to have the reliability (they're more reliable than I am, at least), but present mental health considerations that would be time consuming to work with. Trying to figure out how to establish and maintain boundaries with them AND have a good bit of kinbaku with them sounds exhausting.

The other options are to go out and find more people to consider, or to just not tie at all until I find Miss Perfect. That doesn't feel very healthy to me right now, either.

The phone rings, it's late, it's eleven o clock.
He says sorry if I woke you but I just had to talk
I saw this actress, and she had your hair
I'm sorry, I'm sorry I was never there

She sits up and pulls away from me
Cradles the phone and looks at the sea
Father, have you forgotten it's graduation day
Father, I waited for your call
Father, do you love me at all

The phone rings, it's early, it's seven o'clock
She says I'm sorry I called but I just have to know
Are you just using me, and if not,
where can this possibly go

Do you really love me, are you going to leave me?
She cries louder than the crashing sea
Hush, my child,I am here waiting in your bed
Waiting to caress your sweet shaven head

That night she comes over and over and under
And after we're finished, I lie there and wonder
How long it's been since was I twice her age
And if we're still in the infatuation stage

If I can still clearly remember the day
When I couldn’t let myself feel this way
Fearing someone would come inside my battleworn heart
And once they were past my fear, they’d find nothing to hold dearly to

And in the still hours of the night
She wakes me, all in a fright
She says, Daddy, I had a nightmare
Daddy, I thought I was alone

Hush my darling baby girl,
Daddy's here.