I've been watching a lot of nature and science documentaries lately, being reminded forcibly of all those little-kid wonders about life: how huge the universe is, how huge the Earth is, how huge even a foothill is compared to a human, what an incomprehensibly bizarre phenomenon organic life is, yet how amazingly obvious—even inevitable—it seems. I've also been thinking a lot about how life, for most life forms, ends really quite badly: either you starve, or you die of disease, or you're eaten alive, mercilessly, pitilessly, torn apart by horrible teeth. That thought started to ferment a lot when I heard someone in one of these documentaries say something like
Right now, across Africa, thousands of wildebeest are dying a terrible, cruel death in the jaws of predators.
No way. Thousands? I know that the herds number in the millions, but come on, how many predators are there? I checked it out: tens of thousands of lions live in Africa now, and it is estimated that well into the hundreds of thousands lived there just 50 years ago. If I just think about a hundred thousand lions, then all the other predators that live nearby: hyenas, cheetahs, crocodiles, hunting dogs, birds of prey, I am overwhelmed by the sheer numbers. There are millions upon millions of animals in the world right now, every one of them doomed to die horribly. Scale that up by thinking back, how many breeding seasons would that be for most mammals? That many years. Mammals took over from the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Dinosaurs occupied all the ecological niches now held by mammals, and they lasted 130 million years. Archosaurs were there for 130 million years before the dinosaurs. Jesus. Just counting land and sky animals big enough for us to care about, it's painful to contemplate.
If I could train a thousand squirrels to lie nose-to-tail in a long line, I could walk from one end of that line to the other in about three minutes and 47 seconds. If I could train a million, the walk would take a bit longer: 63 hours seven minutes. In other words, almost three solid days, day-and-night walking, no stopping. Land and sky animals big enough for me to notice that they can suffer have been around for over 300 million years. That's two full years and two months of walking, non-stop. Every one of those squirrels you just walked by died in pain and suffering. But that's nothing. For every single one of them, there are millions upon millions of other creatures living at the same time, dying just as cruelly. Oof. Human suffering, the really nasty stuff we experience at each others' hands, is literally brand-new.
I've heard people complain that there's too much suffering in the world, but I think that perhaps I've never really thought about the suffering, never really tried to grasp how much there really is. There's an awful lot. I can see vividly now why people would say that all the suffering in the world proves that there is no god. I can see that anyone claiming to be in charge would have a lot of explaining to do.
I think I just took another big step toward being an atheist. Yahweh just now appeared to me in a vision as a wizened old dude herding camels in the desert and trying to impress his buddies around the campfire.
Saturday, May 1, 2010
Flying Airplanes, Epilogue
My therapist said something during our last session that got my attention. She said that I must have really struggled in my day-to-day life as a nine-year-old kid after they started molesting me. She gave examples like what I might have thought to myself about carrying a big secret around. She depicts me thinking to myself something like, "What would my friends think if I told them that I'd had sex with my mother?" That seems really strange to me: I don't recall ever thinking about it when it wasn't actually happening. I don't think that I ever sat and rehearsed any of these things to myself until years later, when I mysteriously began to get an inkling that something had gone badly in my childhood. I don't think that it would have ever occurred to me to wonder what my friends would think.
I'm not even certain how I got to a place where I realized that it was wrong. To tell the truth, until just recently, I didn't really have a good handle on why it's best for young teenagers to wait until they're older to have sex. I had asked two therapists years earlier why it's wrong for adults to have sex with their children, and got really murky, unsatisfactory answers about cultural norms and kids being exposed to physical danger.
Now I'm really wondering how I ever discovered that it's wrong to have sex with one's children. I remember at about age 20 making an angry remark to Lori, sarcastically saying that I was going to have sex with her young daughter Tanja. I knew then that I had no such intention and was just making the remark to goad her. But now that I think more about it, maybe it was dawning on me that although I knew that it would be wrong for me to do it, it somehow wasn't wrong when Edd and my mother did it to me. Maybe that angry-young-man phase that I went through was fueled by this realization that I am somehow compelled to follow the rules, but no one else is. "No one else is" is of course my childish interpretation of seeing Edd and my mother break all the rules without ever getting into any kind of trouble.
I definitely have had a huge button all my life about people not seeming to follow the same rules that I do, as though one set of rules is imposed on me, but a much more lenient set of rules (or maybe an empty set) applies to everyone else, especially concerning how everyone else is supposed to treat me in particular. Maybe I've never realized that it's wrong to molest children. Maybe all I've ever realized is that it's inconsistent for my parents to do it while they held me to some moral standard. Not necessarily a standard concerning sexual behavior, but I sure got beaten for various infractions. Maybe at some very deep, childish level I'm just angry that I got all those beatings while Edd and my mother behave in a most depraved fashion and never even got their wrists slapped.
Why don't I remember what I thought during my day-to-day life relative to these sex sessions? Did I carry it around? Block it out? Act strangely? I do recall being called into the school library by the guidance counselor, it must have been third grade or so. But nothing ever came of that; somehow I must have convinced him that I had a normal life. There have been times in my life when I felt that I might burst with a secret, but I don't remember ever feeling like I had some secret to tell anyone or to hide from anyone. Once when I was maybe 13, my friends and I were sitting around talking about sex the way young boys will, and someone wondered aloud what it's like to have sex, or something like that. I mentioned that I had had sex before, and everyone wanted to know with whom. I didn't want to say, "My mother." I wanted to say, "A girl named Donna." My best interpretation, 30 years later, is that I knew then that it would be weird to tell them that I'd had sex with my sister, or with my mother. I must have sensed already that it wasn't cool, even if I didn't sense that there was a moral dimension to the lack of coolness about it.
It has occurred to me at times to think that perhaps I don't know anything about right and wrong. Perhaps all I know is whether something bad will happen when I do this or that. I would not be surprised if this is how my mind works. In fact, I think that I have scolded myself and loathed myself at times for being this way, for being so shallow that I don't really care about what's right, but instead care only about what will get me into trouble or not.
I'm not even certain how I got to a place where I realized that it was wrong. To tell the truth, until just recently, I didn't really have a good handle on why it's best for young teenagers to wait until they're older to have sex. I had asked two therapists years earlier why it's wrong for adults to have sex with their children, and got really murky, unsatisfactory answers about cultural norms and kids being exposed to physical danger.
Now I'm really wondering how I ever discovered that it's wrong to have sex with one's children. I remember at about age 20 making an angry remark to Lori, sarcastically saying that I was going to have sex with her young daughter Tanja. I knew then that I had no such intention and was just making the remark to goad her. But now that I think more about it, maybe it was dawning on me that although I knew that it would be wrong for me to do it, it somehow wasn't wrong when Edd and my mother did it to me. Maybe that angry-young-man phase that I went through was fueled by this realization that I am somehow compelled to follow the rules, but no one else is. "No one else is" is of course my childish interpretation of seeing Edd and my mother break all the rules without ever getting into any kind of trouble.
I definitely have had a huge button all my life about people not seeming to follow the same rules that I do, as though one set of rules is imposed on me, but a much more lenient set of rules (or maybe an empty set) applies to everyone else, especially concerning how everyone else is supposed to treat me in particular. Maybe I've never realized that it's wrong to molest children. Maybe all I've ever realized is that it's inconsistent for my parents to do it while they held me to some moral standard. Not necessarily a standard concerning sexual behavior, but I sure got beaten for various infractions. Maybe at some very deep, childish level I'm just angry that I got all those beatings while Edd and my mother behave in a most depraved fashion and never even got their wrists slapped.
Why don't I remember what I thought during my day-to-day life relative to these sex sessions? Did I carry it around? Block it out? Act strangely? I do recall being called into the school library by the guidance counselor, it must have been third grade or so. But nothing ever came of that; somehow I must have convinced him that I had a normal life. There have been times in my life when I felt that I might burst with a secret, but I don't remember ever feeling like I had some secret to tell anyone or to hide from anyone. Once when I was maybe 13, my friends and I were sitting around talking about sex the way young boys will, and someone wondered aloud what it's like to have sex, or something like that. I mentioned that I had had sex before, and everyone wanted to know with whom. I didn't want to say, "My mother." I wanted to say, "A girl named Donna." My best interpretation, 30 years later, is that I knew then that it would be weird to tell them that I'd had sex with my sister, or with my mother. I must have sensed already that it wasn't cool, even if I didn't sense that there was a moral dimension to the lack of coolness about it.
It has occurred to me at times to think that perhaps I don't know anything about right and wrong. Perhaps all I know is whether something bad will happen when I do this or that. I would not be surprised if this is how my mind works. In fact, I think that I have scolded myself and loathed myself at times for being this way, for being so shallow that I don't really care about what's right, but instead care only about what will get me into trouble or not.
Flying Airplanes, Part II
Why am I doing this? Because my therapist asked me in our last session to give her an idea of how many times my parents molested me. While I sat there recounting the instances, I couldn't look her in the eye, but in my peripheral vision I could see her wincing and reacting. I attenuated the details a bit, but now I'm thinking that maybe I need to dig into them, look at them closely. Or maybe I'm just passing time again. I don't know.
So other instances. I don't clearly recall two separate hotel visits; I'm relying on other memories, memories of narratives that have been sitting in my mind for almost 30 years. I've told myself all this time that there were two hotel visits. My guess is that there really were two visits, and I remembered them clearly at some point, established the narrative in my memory, then forgot the details. I assume, for the time being, that my memory is at least mostly reliable concerning the broad brushstrokes, that I'm not fabricating anything significant.
I'm sitting on the edge of her bed in the late afternoon. I'm wearing just a swimsuit, just some form-fitting nylon/lycra shorts. I was on a swim team for a while, and I seem to recall running around in a swimsuit not being too unusual. She's sitting next to me, on the right. He's sitting next to her, on her right. I lie back and stretch. While I do this, she reaches over with her left hand, and using her fingernails, stimulates my penis with a light scratching motion. It feels really good, but the pleasure seems to be an integral part of the fact that I'm stretching. I still don't make any connection between this pleasure and sexual pleasure; it doesn't register on my radar that the pleasure is coming from my penis. My best recollection is that it was just an intensely good stretch. This seems a bit strange to me, as I am reminded that I never really noticed how good it feels to stretch until I was in my early 20's, when my girlfriend Rhonda, lying in bed one morning, wondered aloud why it feels so good to stretch.
Next, on a different day, they're watching and instructing me while I attempt to have sex with Donna, my oldest sister. If I were nine at the time, she would have been 16. I don't actually remember fucking her. I remember something going on, but I don't have any details except the memory of her saying, "He's so little!" When they had me fuck my mother, my nine-year-old body didn't fit her adult body very well, so we had to put pillows under her butt so I could reach her properly. Presumably the same problem occurred with Donna, but I guess we didn't try the pillows option. My next memory is apparently from the same day: I'm in my bedroom with Donna. No visual memories here; it might be that it was nighttime and the lights were turned off; I have a sense of complete blackness, rather than just a lack of memory. I can feel Donna grasping my erect penis and saying, "Wow, you're hard," or something very much to that effect. That's all I remember. It's almost as though I fell asleep immediately. I wonder what really happened. I wish I could remember.
On a different day, Becky, Lori, and I are under the covers with her. She's naked, we're fondling her naked body at will while Edd sits nearby. He couldn't have actually been watching us, as we were under the covers. Or at least that's how I remember it. The only other real memory I have is of being angry that Becky and Lori were there, and at one point finding myself going after the same part of my mother's body as Lori was going after, and feeling angry toward her for disrupting whatever it was I was trying to do.
One night while they were alone in her locked room as usual, they called me in. I don't recall feeling like I was getting some great treat, but I think I must have felt that way. It definitely was a treat to be allowed into her room, to get her attention. He had me put my fingers into her pussy. She was doing Kegel flexes. He said something like, "Think how good that would feel to your dick." I still didn't know what he was talking about; sexual pleasure was a few years into the future for me. Possibly at the same time, or possibly on another night, I don't remember, he instructed me on how to lick my mother's pussy. He showed me her clitoris, but I didn't recognize it; it was decades later that I finally recognized a clitoris. He instructed me to "eat" her pussy like I would eat an orange. I took my best guess and ate my mother's pussy like an orange. As usual, he checked in with her level of pleasure while I did it.
He spent the night quite often, or at least I think he did. Now my memory isn't so clear, but he at least spent the weekend nights. One weekend night he had to go out of town or something, but he gave me instructions ahead of time. Sleep with my mother, have sex with her. I tried to: we were lying there in her bed in the dark. She was lying on her right side, facing away from me. I reached over and grabbed her left breast, and she said angrily, "Robbie, you're tickling me." I stopped what I was doing immediately--I don't recall clearly, but I think that I was extremely ashamed--but I have no memory of what happened after that. I must have gone to sleep. I don't really remember the feelings that I had at the moment, but when I feel terrible, overwhelming rejection like I did when my girlfriend broke up with me, I think that it must be similar to the way I felt that night.
I think that my mother really set me up that night. Obviously she didn't know that she was setting me up; she is a selfish idiot, but I don't think that she had it in mind to destroy me deliberately. But up until that time the only love I'd ever received from her was during these sexual molestation sessions. I think that I must have associated her approval with the sexual behavior I was enacting. I can see it very clearly now that in my adult relationships, I try to get approval from my partner primarily through sex, especially good sex, well-performed, skilled sex. When she rejected me like that, saying that I was tickling her, she probably cemented the idea that approval comes from good sex and disapproval comes from bad sex.
Strange: I hate being tickled, and I hate tickling people. This is noteworthy, because my daughter loves to be tickled and often asks me to tickle her. I've never asked myself whether my reluctance to tickle her is in some way related to my mother being angry that I was tickling her. I'll have to think about that one.
So other instances. I don't clearly recall two separate hotel visits; I'm relying on other memories, memories of narratives that have been sitting in my mind for almost 30 years. I've told myself all this time that there were two hotel visits. My guess is that there really were two visits, and I remembered them clearly at some point, established the narrative in my memory, then forgot the details. I assume, for the time being, that my memory is at least mostly reliable concerning the broad brushstrokes, that I'm not fabricating anything significant.
I'm sitting on the edge of her bed in the late afternoon. I'm wearing just a swimsuit, just some form-fitting nylon/lycra shorts. I was on a swim team for a while, and I seem to recall running around in a swimsuit not being too unusual. She's sitting next to me, on the right. He's sitting next to her, on her right. I lie back and stretch. While I do this, she reaches over with her left hand, and using her fingernails, stimulates my penis with a light scratching motion. It feels really good, but the pleasure seems to be an integral part of the fact that I'm stretching. I still don't make any connection between this pleasure and sexual pleasure; it doesn't register on my radar that the pleasure is coming from my penis. My best recollection is that it was just an intensely good stretch. This seems a bit strange to me, as I am reminded that I never really noticed how good it feels to stretch until I was in my early 20's, when my girlfriend Rhonda, lying in bed one morning, wondered aloud why it feels so good to stretch.
Next, on a different day, they're watching and instructing me while I attempt to have sex with Donna, my oldest sister. If I were nine at the time, she would have been 16. I don't actually remember fucking her. I remember something going on, but I don't have any details except the memory of her saying, "He's so little!" When they had me fuck my mother, my nine-year-old body didn't fit her adult body very well, so we had to put pillows under her butt so I could reach her properly. Presumably the same problem occurred with Donna, but I guess we didn't try the pillows option. My next memory is apparently from the same day: I'm in my bedroom with Donna. No visual memories here; it might be that it was nighttime and the lights were turned off; I have a sense of complete blackness, rather than just a lack of memory. I can feel Donna grasping my erect penis and saying, "Wow, you're hard," or something very much to that effect. That's all I remember. It's almost as though I fell asleep immediately. I wonder what really happened. I wish I could remember.
On a different day, Becky, Lori, and I are under the covers with her. She's naked, we're fondling her naked body at will while Edd sits nearby. He couldn't have actually been watching us, as we were under the covers. Or at least that's how I remember it. The only other real memory I have is of being angry that Becky and Lori were there, and at one point finding myself going after the same part of my mother's body as Lori was going after, and feeling angry toward her for disrupting whatever it was I was trying to do.
One night while they were alone in her locked room as usual, they called me in. I don't recall feeling like I was getting some great treat, but I think I must have felt that way. It definitely was a treat to be allowed into her room, to get her attention. He had me put my fingers into her pussy. She was doing Kegel flexes. He said something like, "Think how good that would feel to your dick." I still didn't know what he was talking about; sexual pleasure was a few years into the future for me. Possibly at the same time, or possibly on another night, I don't remember, he instructed me on how to lick my mother's pussy. He showed me her clitoris, but I didn't recognize it; it was decades later that I finally recognized a clitoris. He instructed me to "eat" her pussy like I would eat an orange. I took my best guess and ate my mother's pussy like an orange. As usual, he checked in with her level of pleasure while I did it.
He spent the night quite often, or at least I think he did. Now my memory isn't so clear, but he at least spent the weekend nights. One weekend night he had to go out of town or something, but he gave me instructions ahead of time. Sleep with my mother, have sex with her. I tried to: we were lying there in her bed in the dark. She was lying on her right side, facing away from me. I reached over and grabbed her left breast, and she said angrily, "Robbie, you're tickling me." I stopped what I was doing immediately--I don't recall clearly, but I think that I was extremely ashamed--but I have no memory of what happened after that. I must have gone to sleep. I don't really remember the feelings that I had at the moment, but when I feel terrible, overwhelming rejection like I did when my girlfriend broke up with me, I think that it must be similar to the way I felt that night.
I think that my mother really set me up that night. Obviously she didn't know that she was setting me up; she is a selfish idiot, but I don't think that she had it in mind to destroy me deliberately. But up until that time the only love I'd ever received from her was during these sexual molestation sessions. I think that I must have associated her approval with the sexual behavior I was enacting. I can see it very clearly now that in my adult relationships, I try to get approval from my partner primarily through sex, especially good sex, well-performed, skilled sex. When she rejected me like that, saying that I was tickling her, she probably cemented the idea that approval comes from good sex and disapproval comes from bad sex.
Strange: I hate being tickled, and I hate tickling people. This is noteworthy, because my daughter loves to be tickled and often asks me to tickle her. I've never asked myself whether my reluctance to tickle her is in some way related to my mother being angry that I was tickling her. I'll have to think about that one.
Flying Airplanes, Part I
The first memory I have of it all is an auditory memory, or maybe not even that much, maybe just the words: flying airplanes. I always have this difficulty with my memories: if I try to pin them down so I can closely examine them, they sort of dissolve. I have to sit and wait for them to float back into my peripheral vision and promise not to stare. Something about how the three of us would go flying in Edd's small Cessna in the near future. I don't even have an actual memory about it, just the words, flying airplanes, sitting there in my mind like the label on a tacky birthday gift.
I've been telling myself for years that I was ten years old when this happened. I don't recall now which signposts I used in forming this belief, but now the belief is all I have. I could have been a year younger or older. In fact, now that I think of it, I'm pretty sure that I turned ten in 5th grade, and because I would have been nine at the beginning of the school year, I must have been nine when they first began to molest me, because it happened some time before 5th grade.
The next memory I have is an image: he, in the driver's seat, presumably of his blue-and-silver, mid-70's model Chevrolet El Camino. My mother sits to his right. I sense her, but I don't really have a visual memory of her. The thing that I have in place of a visual memory surely is a later fabrication: her sitting there, silent, hands in her lap, head down, in shame. I don't believe that to be a true memory, although it would have been appropriate. He said these words, although I won't impose any order on them: "I'm gonna let you do...no other man". Without making any promises about which parts are real and which parts are fabrications, I'll translate this in the way that I always have: "I'm gonna let you do things with your mother that I would never let any other man do." That's the meaning of the thing that I remember, if not the exact words. The only other memory I have of that scene is the sense that we were out on a freeway, with afternoon rush-hour traffic, while he said this to me. I have no memory of whether I realized that we weren't going to fly after all, or whether I was disappointed about this fact.
The next thing I remember is driving into a hotel parking lot, but maybe that's not a real memory. That could be something I've filled in over the years. The rest of the memories come in no particular order. My mother and I are naked. She's lying on her back on the bed, and he has been instructing me on how to suck my mother's nipple. While I do it, he tells me to open my mouth a little wider, to cover her entire areola. He asks her throughout the night whether my actions feel good to her; she always responds positively. He has me finger her, pointing out that I should always use my middle finger, "because it's the longest." He reminds me to make sure that it feels good to her by asking her periodically.
Then they have me fuck her. This part is strange on several levels. First, at this time of my life I have no sense of sexual pleasure whatsoever. I don't think I was even aware of the pleasure of urinating--that had to be pointed out to me decades later. However, I did get sporadic erections. Usually when I had to pee, but sometimes just being naked could make it happen. I never experienced any pleasure from them. So I did have an erection when they had me fuck her, so I really did fuck her. My penis was so small, and my body was so small, that it didn't work at first: they had to put a couple of pillows under her butt so I could reach her better. I don't remember the specific act of fucking her. I mean, I don't recall the experience as I would recall having sex with someone now, as an adult. I recall it being more like lying on top of her and feeling very close to her.
I say, "'Feeling very close to her" rather guardedly. I've told myself for years that being molested by my mother was a happy experience at the time, because I felt loved by her for the first time in my life. That's definitely an embellishment of my actual memories. If I sit here and think about it, really try to remember, I do get a physical reaction, which is really rare for me, so I will assume for now that it's a legitimate memory. I remember this terrible ache from when I was little. I felt it often around my older sisters' girlfriends. I somehow associate that ache with the feeling I had when I was fucking my mother. Like the two are inversely related, that sex made the ache go away. But no, that's not a real memory, the part about the ache going away. More like the ache appeared in my life after they started molesting me. That seems plausible, that after finding sex to be the only route to genuine affection, I would start to ache around any older female.
That's all I remember from the first hotel session. I have a few flashes from a second session: me, being eager to get started, saying that the room is really warm and taking my clothes off, watching her suck his dick, hearing her say, in a cheesy, pornographic ecstasy, "I'm a fucking machine!"being surprised at the goo on my fingers when I went to the bathroom after having fingered her for a while. Now that I think of it, I wonder what that was. I remember it as being brown. Blood? No, couldn't be--I would have recognized blood, if not on my fingers then surely everywhere else. I know what it's like to have sex with a menstruating woman. I have no memory of any such messiness. I have only two other certain memories: lighting their cigarettes for them, which now I'm looking at closely to see just how appalling that is, and going to the hotel's internal restaurant to get a grilled cheese sandwich for myself. I think that the whole experience seemed like a special treat for me, getting this special, private interaction with my parents and being allowed to do special things (like smoking and getting a treat from a restaurant).
This is just the beginning. I'm going to post it and see how I feel about having such atrocities about myself available to the public, while I work on Part II.
I've been telling myself for years that I was ten years old when this happened. I don't recall now which signposts I used in forming this belief, but now the belief is all I have. I could have been a year younger or older. In fact, now that I think of it, I'm pretty sure that I turned ten in 5th grade, and because I would have been nine at the beginning of the school year, I must have been nine when they first began to molest me, because it happened some time before 5th grade.
The next memory I have is an image: he, in the driver's seat, presumably of his blue-and-silver, mid-70's model Chevrolet El Camino. My mother sits to his right. I sense her, but I don't really have a visual memory of her. The thing that I have in place of a visual memory surely is a later fabrication: her sitting there, silent, hands in her lap, head down, in shame. I don't believe that to be a true memory, although it would have been appropriate. He said these words, although I won't impose any order on them: "I'm gonna let you do...no other man". Without making any promises about which parts are real and which parts are fabrications, I'll translate this in the way that I always have: "I'm gonna let you do things with your mother that I would never let any other man do." That's the meaning of the thing that I remember, if not the exact words. The only other memory I have of that scene is the sense that we were out on a freeway, with afternoon rush-hour traffic, while he said this to me. I have no memory of whether I realized that we weren't going to fly after all, or whether I was disappointed about this fact.
The next thing I remember is driving into a hotel parking lot, but maybe that's not a real memory. That could be something I've filled in over the years. The rest of the memories come in no particular order. My mother and I are naked. She's lying on her back on the bed, and he has been instructing me on how to suck my mother's nipple. While I do it, he tells me to open my mouth a little wider, to cover her entire areola. He asks her throughout the night whether my actions feel good to her; she always responds positively. He has me finger her, pointing out that I should always use my middle finger, "because it's the longest." He reminds me to make sure that it feels good to her by asking her periodically.
Then they have me fuck her. This part is strange on several levels. First, at this time of my life I have no sense of sexual pleasure whatsoever. I don't think I was even aware of the pleasure of urinating--that had to be pointed out to me decades later. However, I did get sporadic erections. Usually when I had to pee, but sometimes just being naked could make it happen. I never experienced any pleasure from them. So I did have an erection when they had me fuck her, so I really did fuck her. My penis was so small, and my body was so small, that it didn't work at first: they had to put a couple of pillows under her butt so I could reach her better. I don't remember the specific act of fucking her. I mean, I don't recall the experience as I would recall having sex with someone now, as an adult. I recall it being more like lying on top of her and feeling very close to her.
I say, "'Feeling very close to her" rather guardedly. I've told myself for years that being molested by my mother was a happy experience at the time, because I felt loved by her for the first time in my life. That's definitely an embellishment of my actual memories. If I sit here and think about it, really try to remember, I do get a physical reaction, which is really rare for me, so I will assume for now that it's a legitimate memory. I remember this terrible ache from when I was little. I felt it often around my older sisters' girlfriends. I somehow associate that ache with the feeling I had when I was fucking my mother. Like the two are inversely related, that sex made the ache go away. But no, that's not a real memory, the part about the ache going away. More like the ache appeared in my life after they started molesting me. That seems plausible, that after finding sex to be the only route to genuine affection, I would start to ache around any older female.
That's all I remember from the first hotel session. I have a few flashes from a second session: me, being eager to get started, saying that the room is really warm and taking my clothes off, watching her suck his dick, hearing her say, in a cheesy, pornographic ecstasy, "I'm a fucking machine!"being surprised at the goo on my fingers when I went to the bathroom after having fingered her for a while. Now that I think of it, I wonder what that was. I remember it as being brown. Blood? No, couldn't be--I would have recognized blood, if not on my fingers then surely everywhere else. I know what it's like to have sex with a menstruating woman. I have no memory of any such messiness. I have only two other certain memories: lighting their cigarettes for them, which now I'm looking at closely to see just how appalling that is, and going to the hotel's internal restaurant to get a grilled cheese sandwich for myself. I think that the whole experience seemed like a special treat for me, getting this special, private interaction with my parents and being allowed to do special things (like smoking and getting a treat from a restaurant).
This is just the beginning. I'm going to post it and see how I feel about having such atrocities about myself available to the public, while I work on Part II.
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Upheaval
Not even sure how to write about the last few days. Something huge is shifting, something about the way I see reality. I don't think that I'm discovering a solution, sad to say. It just seems like something big is changing. Watching a Richard Dawkins interview; he says that it really bugged him to try to explain the apparent design in nature with a designer: it only begged the question of where the designer came from. I just now realized the mind-blowing obviousness of the question, because I've never allowed myself the right to ask about the designer. I've always had this unconscious lid on top of that question. I started to say that kind of question, but maybe that's the only question of its kind. I'm not sure. I'm pretty stoned at the moment.
What if the end of all this is that I convert back to being religious, but worshiping a different god? One who's much more powerful than Yahweh? Or, although it makes me cringe to think it, that it really is Yahweh and I've misjudged him? No, the only way I know Yahweh is via the Bible, so yeah, if there is a god, it's not Yahweh.
Denys Turner now, he's making a case that god is the thing that comes to you in a flash of inspiration when you're at wit's end. I call that the "It was in the last place I looked for it!" principle. Of course when you have a good idea, it gets you out of the place you're in. If you hadn't had a good idea, then you wouldn't have noticed it. Confirmation bias, it seems like.
What if the end of all this is that I convert back to being religious, but worshiping a different god? One who's much more powerful than Yahweh? Or, although it makes me cringe to think it, that it really is Yahweh and I've misjudged him? No, the only way I know Yahweh is via the Bible, so yeah, if there is a god, it's not Yahweh.
Denys Turner now, he's making a case that god is the thing that comes to you in a flash of inspiration when you're at wit's end. I call that the "It was in the last place I looked for it!" principle. Of course when you have a good idea, it gets you out of the place you're in. If you hadn't had a good idea, then you wouldn't have noticed it. Confirmation bias, it seems like.
Sunday, April 4, 2010
Drug-induced Poetry
What is this experience
It bears some resemblance
to pain
a bone-crushing pressure
teeth being pulled
a jabanero on the lips
the jab of a broom handle
in the hip?
It bears some resemblance
to something I can control
a muscle
some set of muscles
that I've never used
as I never knew
they were there.
It moves inside me
It surrounds me
It thinks for me
making me laugh for
no reason at all
Forever reminding me
that I'm not funny.
I endlessly cycle
forgetting the same
fifteen-or-so things
over and over.
Sometimes the
roar of the machinery or
the background music
will go silent
surprising me.
It bears some resemblance
to pain
a bone-crushing pressure
teeth being pulled
a jabanero on the lips
the jab of a broom handle
in the hip?
It bears some resemblance
to something I can control
a muscle
some set of muscles
that I've never used
as I never knew
they were there.
It moves inside me
It surrounds me
It thinks for me
making me laugh for
no reason at all
Forever reminding me
that I'm not funny.
I endlessly cycle
forgetting the same
fifteen-or-so things
over and over.
Sometimes the
roar of the machinery or
the background music
will go silent
surprising me.
Thursday, April 1, 2010
On the problem of evil
I have finally figured out the problem of evil that philosophers and theologians have wrestled with for thousands of years. I finally get it, after a blinding flash of insight I had while considering Darwin's problem with the family of wasps known as the ichneumonidae:
But now I can see a reason why this terrible deity would, out of love (albeit a sick and twisted kind of love, the kind with which I'm most familiar), give us the example of the ichneumonidae: he wishes to show us that he really does mean business, that he really is willing to torture us if we don't love him.
The ichneumonidae could well be the most obvious sign of God's existence, character, and intentions that I've ever seen. Now I understand why God allows evil to exist.
I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars...
But now I can see a reason why this terrible deity would, out of love (albeit a sick and twisted kind of love, the kind with which I'm most familiar), give us the example of the ichneumonidae: he wishes to show us that he really does mean business, that he really is willing to torture us if we don't love him.
The ichneumonidae could well be the most obvious sign of God's existence, character, and intentions that I've ever seen. Now I understand why God allows evil to exist.
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