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notmuchtoconceal · 2 years

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two autumns ago, my grandmother developed pancreatic cancer.

we hadn't been close in some time.

she was as much the victim of my grandfather as my mother was the victim of my father -- though unlike my father, he was simply a decent, if foolish and sometimes selfish man with a tempestuous nature... in many ways simply a man of his time.

growing up, the house was always littered with the warmth and sheddings of the many animals she kept. cats. dogs. she would howl like a madwoman every sunday when the bears scored a touchdown, pounding the floor until that fateful fourth of july i served the volleyball which knocked her down and shattered her hip.

she would tell me my lifelong aversion to football was the result of her performing this elaborate display of devotion as she cradled me on her lap as an infant, shaking and rattling my frail body.

there were periods in my life -- where i was severed from my body.

the predominant feeling i retain from childhood is of being a mind trapped inside a skull, looking out through a porthole into a wide world, and finding myself unable to form words, stammering through pauses, as the people who towered over me told me who i was and what i should think, and my own thoughts would wither behind my eyes as i seemed to accept that the things i said were not how others thought, or the thoughts i should be thinking.

my grandmother -- prone to the stress of a husband who ignored her, who belittled and minimized her -- would at times naturally take these frustrations out on the only ones she could.

not the animals. never the animals. animals were innocent.

human beings were capable of premeditation, envy, malice.

it was never as bad with her as it was with my dad. there was never any prolonged degradation. never any being cornered as i tried to get back to my room. never any beating. never any breaking down doors. never any laughing at me as i cried after he knocked my mother unconscious seconds after he begged me to come and help him.

in some ways it still hurt more, simply because i was closer to her. the dramatic stuff tends to fade over time, as it becomes the fodder for funny stories. the dramatic stuff gets you sympathy. the dramatic stuff can't be overlooked. people feel it in the telling.

the little things -- that's not so clear.

they build up. there's always plausible deniability.

it's not something i suppose a person would expect, but the pain which lingered longest was frustratingly abstract.

i felt as though neither she nor anyone else could ever know me.

not because i was particularly deep, particularly insightful, but because i felt they weren't seeing "me" -- or rather, they could see nothing but "me" and "I' was the one who was doing the thinking.

as far as i could tell -- they didn't know "I" existed.

they thought "I" was being made up.

suppose children really have no business thinking as much as i did, unless something compels them to. my mother always told me she wanted me to just be happy and be a kid, but my not thinking would be an invitation to slavery. if i didn't think, if i took my father at face value, "I" would not have made it out alive, though i doubt anything too terrible would have happened to "me".

there was no risk of violation to my bodily integrity.

my parents wanted me to work and play sports.

the part of me which is "me" could have endured any blow. had endured many blows over the course of my first two decades.

psychic integrity was irrelevant.

"I" was invisible. "I" knew i was powerful, but fragile.

"I" just wanted a chance to be alive.

"I" had no idea why my own father wanted to kill me --

kill me and take control of "me".

why my own father wanted to live inside my body.

my mother told me she thought i was too sensitive. i guess she hadn't had a truly good mindfuck in awhile, the tread having long gone off that tire many years before i was born.

my grandmother, with her emphasis on the furry, fleshy, soft and comforting, combined with what seemed her total disregard for me as an intellectual entity, drove me to feelings of years-long dehumanization, as though i was worth nothing above the level of a beast, a man though i longed to be in every sense of the word.

i felt sick.

i felt sick, as though i could never be anything more than a pet to women who wouldn't love me.

for years, the thought of pup-play shit made me gag, i could only think about how my grandmother would stroke the ear of her timid yorky, cuddled up in her lap, crying and whining when she was gone, no different from your typical heterosexual man.

the timeframe is a bit hazy --

i was deeply hypnotized, heavily using weed, and have since suffered a subsequent mental breakdown or two.

(self-diagnostic and repair refines with age)

sometime during my descent into bodily gnosis through meatheadification, i became aware of the stark similarities between men and dogs -- their pack nature, their tendency to patrol, to mark, to retrieve, and slowly and steadily i began to integrate these qualities more directly into my conscious awareness, letting me follow inclinations and modes of thinking i'd long repressed.

so many things which had once seemed unbearable --

no longer troubled me at all.

the way in which our culture discusses human emotions, particularly at present, is biased towards how women think, as it is typically the job of a woman to help a man understand how he feels.

to a typical woman, many normative masculine drives may seem inexplicable or psychotic, and this has its origins in our hunter-gatherer roots and millions of years of evolution -- trends in social construction being additional factors on top of this, as civilization is in part refinement, simplification and subversion of nature.

men have urges they can't meet with women.

men need to know how to function in a pack to be fully themselves.

if a boy is not sufficiently confident in his own thoughts -- say, for he has no clear role models and disruptive tendencies which tend toward anti and asocial behavior -- he may be prone to problematize his own masculinity, for he has no yardstick for what even constitutes masculinity, let alone positive examples to emulate.

i'm not an isolated example.

i know dozens of men who've manifested similar symptoms.

the patriarchal mid-century american society infantilized women, who then infantilized men, who then together created an infantilized generation, and all the meanwhile technological acceleration and a trend to convenience have left many with the belief that masculinity is obsolete, men and women essentially the same, and gender itself an outmoded institution to be replaced with an asexual or intellectualized performative mode endlessly subverting itself.

as long as we have physical bodies, we need gender.

gender needn't be tyranny. gender is personality. gender is ostentation. gender is burlesque. gender is part of the basic grammar of how we present ourselves to others. gender should be fun.

our sexed bodies possess an element of terror, particularly to those who live primarily in the mind and experience visceral urges as a sharp intrusion into what is otherwise monastic harmony, but to deny what we would prefer to ignore is simply to languish in delusion.

for centuries, man experienced himself as an untouchable entity at the center of the universe, and the ascent of the natural sciences, with their revelations of a heliocentric solar system and man as the generational progeny of apes deflated our grandiose ego.

the tendency then became -- man is no different from any other animal. the animal body is a biological machine. any considerations of a soul or higher power is a foolish notion fit only for social control, still clung to by imbeciles without the strength to face a cold, uncaring and strictly deterministic reality.

this was a knee-jerk reaction. a rationalization from betrayal.

man is not the same as every other animal.

man has an indisputable animal origin. man retains his vital animal instincts. man has the capacity for violence, rape and predation.

man has also elevated himself above nature. man has appointed himself caretaker of the natural world. man is capable of tremendous reason, beauty and widespread organization and construction.

the urban centers -- at the scale they occupy -- reduce us to the level of insects. many bodies within a hive. towering cell walls constructed from materials of our chimerical making.

man is not an animal -- man is every animal at once.

man is every animal at once, for man retains a piece of the transcendent. our capacity for higher thought, the logos, of which christ was historical personification and model

(reason, peace, love)

is what the hypothesis of god describes -- it is what exists beyond our bodies, and yet which we know to be a part of ourselves; that which allows us to remake the world in the image of ourselves, for we can see the ways in which the physical world is a series of the same repeating shapes and patterns, and what we see is what we are.

no other animal can think the way we do.

no other animal can think.

man remains animal. man remains uniquely special.

(least as far as the planet earth is concerned)

my grandmother told me she never wanted me to be cold.

her own father was an asian alpha male with a gambling addiction who took full custody of her and her sisters. she would describe how she would lie awake at night, listening to him bring his mistress into the apartment, her heels tapping on the hardwood floor.

clack clack clack

it terrified her, i think -- that he was both the man she knew, and yet had the capacity for violence.

as though he were two men in one body.

intuitively i could connect this line of thinking to a previous comment she'd made about viggo mortensen's stunning performance in david cronenberg's a history of violence -- where his character, a mild-mannered small business owner, simply through the subtle motions of his eyes, flips the switch and becomes the mafia hardass he'd been in a previous life, now for the purpose of protecting his family.

on some level, she never wanted me to be a man because she never wanted me to leave or to hurt her.

i didn't know what i felt -- when i found out she had cancer.

i didn't feel anything.

i didn't know -- that my own emotions weren't mine.

i didn't think about it. it was always there.

i didn't talk about it with anyone.

on a subconscious level, i committed myself to a controlled demolition of the man i thought i was.

i knew i needed to break.

i knew i couldn't keep going on as though the way i was was normal.

at the time i had been talking to a boy i was quite fond of, who like most of my best submissives and conversation partners, often had a better understanding of who i was than i did.

i told him i never wanted him to leave me, knowing full well that would drive him away, which it immediately did.

then i was wanting for a brother cell. i was desperate again.

that i knew, on some level, that "I" wasn't the one steering my destiny drove me into increasingly elaborate rationalizations.

the increasingly stupid decisions i made, as though that other part of me was pushing me to confront my past failings by reliving them in the present moment drove me to notice lapses in memory, moments where it seemed as though "I" was speaking, but my voice seemed to be hijacked -- made me take note of a lifelong tendency shared by my brothers and i where a comment is spoken, thinking it sounds wholly innocent, followed by a pause for we realize something about our tone or phrasing marked it with a subtly venomous intent.

you can't suppress how you really feel forever.

you -- some part of you -- will find a way to make you accept.

one afternoon my father came home, fresh from the realization he had a bastard son and no obligation to care for him, and hopped up once more on getting off scot-free being worthless, told me i'd be caring for him in his old age, changing his diapers like he changed mine. he lifted his eagle and his cross, his dual totemic gods of christianity and nationalism, as if to blind me with their aura.

he was a godless man.

he didn't believe in love. he didn't believe in service to his country.

his only god was his own ugly self-gratification.

he, as a father, destroyed himself by destroying his progeny.

my father was nothing.

i don't remember the exact words that followed.

i told him he could rot. he never took care of me.

he was no father of mine.

then, spellbound, the other part of me spoke up --

i lost time.

i only remembered a few hours later what i'd said.

why can't ya please your wife, dad?

the look on his face. his impotence revealed. his simpering, childlike nature. he could only run. run far from me. run towards the woman he claimed to despise, and yet who was the only one who truly wanted him, as he was the only one who truly needed her.

my father. my mother's first and only.

the next time i saw him, fresh from a shower, naked, he lowered his head in shame.

son, he said.

i laughed at him. it was good and right.

narcissism is a shame-based distortion. an authentic narcissist is trying to be an imaginary perfect person, for they can only conceive of themselves as the sum total of their ugliest and most traumatic moments. my father was a scared, pissing little girl castrated by his own domineering mother and was too weak to raise any of his four sons -- then he blamed my mother for us being fags.

it seeped into me.

for years i could only deny all the ways i was exactly like him.

he was the only man i knew. they sent me to a school outside my district, using my father's mother's address, and i had to lie about where i lived or get kicked out, so i didn't make many friends.

after twelve months into my relationship with @flyoverkushtaka the stress of being betrayed by two resentful hangers-on i thought were lifelong friends finally got to me, and i ended up howling at him over cam for close to three hours, blistering him with obscenity after obscenity as he sat there in a state of shock and endured me.

i never wanted anyone to see me like that.

i would rather have died than let someone see me like that.

the next night -- two hours before we were to get on cam again, i collapsed on the floor of my bedroom, racked by agony as though my own nervous system were throttling me -- sobbing, mewling, yelping I WANNA DIE I WANNA DIE I WANNA DIE I WANNA DIE

he didn't stop loving me -- after he saw me like that.

i never thought -- anyone could love me after they'd seen me like that. i thought that i was broken. i thought that any slip up and i'd be garbage again. nobody would invest the time into me -- if i wasn't already their perfect and beautiful fuck fantasy.

my grandmother must have heard it.

the walls are thin. my brief high school theatrical career proved i was the rare sort who knew how to project.

she was the only one who was willing to listen.

she was the only one who would confess and apologize for her complicity in the abuse. my mother cried, denied, minimized, gave up, succumbed further to delusion. even though she had cancer, even though she was struggling through weekly chemo sessions, my grandmother was willing to listen. she was no fool. she was genuinely considerate. she was willing to endure it when i screamed at her.

on some level, she enjoyed it that i screamed at her.

on some level, i was filling her with my vital force.

rage is motivation. depression is defeat.

on some level, exposure to my vitriol, my passion, my raw animus, further mobilized her body to stifle its treacherous rebellion.

my grandmother is the source of so much of my courage, my creativity, my wit. in many ways, she's the only member of my immediately family outside my brothers i have any lasting and consistent affection for, for a part of me is truly her.

-- and she didn't have to rape herself into me to do it.

she has no cancer anymore. she has half a pancreas.

it's not clear how much longer she'll be around.

i feel as though i've lost too much time.

a whole three decades spent in struggle. there is no price too steep to pay for control of your own mind.

your mind ought be a devoted and loving partner to your body.

i fought, and i pushed back, and i cut myself off from other people at great personal and social expense because freedom meant something to me. my father, though a mediocre democratic man looking only to coast, did imbue me with a love of liberty that i have no qualms about watering with blood, beautiful bloom that it is.

no sacrifice is too great to be the man you are.

so many of the things i thought i'd wanted -- i only wanted because i was desperate for contact with other people, and the only way i thought i could get that was by being something i'm not.

it don't have to be this way, bros.

people will respect you -- people will wanna be around you -- if you know what you stand for and aren't ashamed to be who you are. you have no good reason to back down so easy.

the types of people who get avoided -- they're the people pleasers.

they're the types who come on nice, yet have no kindness inside of them -- they know they're too weak to get away with being the assholes they are, so they fake nice and lie their asses off.

even if you're insecure, even if you don't know what you want, even if you need help, if you own your bullshit, people will respect that.

if they don't -- that's not your problem.

you don't need to be liked. they don't need to like you.

everyone expects the bullshit. everyone knows they want something different. when you speak your truth, you attract the people who wanna live by your truth. when you pretend to be someone you're not, you surround yourself with other people who aren't.

everyone wins -- when you become the man you're supposed to be.

pretty simple shit when i say it like that, huh bro?

#golden retriever instincts #phenomonology and the meathead #writhe for me wormboy #dog brain #woof woof

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