Q….
‘Do you?’
Q.
‘The secret is you got to both give the little lady pleasure and be able to also take it, with equal technique to both and equal pleasure. Or at least you got to make her think so. Don’t forget it’s about her. Go on and eat her yingyang till she begs, sure, go on, but also let her at your pizzle, and even if she’s no prize at it why you carry on and make her think she is. And like if her notion of a backrub’s just some of those little pissant karate chops on your backbone, why you go on and let her, and you carry on like you never knew a karate chop could be like this. That’s if a fellow wants to be a genuine Great Lover and go and think about her for one damn second.’
Q.
‘Not on me darlin’, no. I mean I usually do but I nibbled them up already I’m afraid. The real falldown of these wannabe-Great-type fellows is they think a lady is, when you come right down to it, dumb. Like all a lady wants to do is just lie there and come. The real secret is: assume she feels the same way. That she wants to see herself as a Great Lover that can blow the top of a man’s head clean off in bed. Let her. Put your picture of yourself on the goddamn back burner for once in your life. The smoothies think if they blow the little lady’s head off down there they got her. Bullshit.’
Q.
‘But you’re not going to just want one, though, darlin’, trust me. There’s a little Mart thing a couple blocks if we — whoa, watch your—’
Q.
‘No, you go on and make her think she’s blowing your damn head off. That’s what they really want. Then you really and truly got her, if she thinks you’ll never forget her. Never ever. You follow?’
B.I. #36 05-97
METROPOLITAN DOMESTIC VIOLENCE COMMUNITY OUTREACH, COUNSELING, AND SERVICES CENTER ANNEX
AURORA IL
‘So I decided to get help. I got in touch with the fact that the real problem had nothing to do with her. I saw that she would forever go on playing victim to my villain. I was powerless to change her. She was not the part of the problem I could, you know, address. So I made a decision. To get help for me. I now know it was the best thing I’ve ever done, and the hardest. It hasn’t been easy, but my self-esteem is much higher now. I’ve halted the shame spiral. I’ve learned forgiveness. I like myself.’
Q.
‘Who?’
YET ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF THE POROUSNESS OF CERTAIN BORDERS (XI)
As in all those other dreams, I’m with somebody I know but don’t know how I know them, and now this person suddenly points out to me that I’m blind. As in literally blind, unsighted, etc. Or else it’s in the presence of this person that I suddenly realize I’m blind. What happens when I realize this is I get sad. It makes me incredibly sad that I’m blind. The person somehow knows how sad I am and warns me that crying will hurt my eyes somehow and make the blindness even worse, but I can’t help it. I sit down and start crying really hard. I wake crying in bed, and I’m crying so hard I can’t really see anything or make anything out or anything. This makes me cry even harder. My girlfriend is concerned and wakes up and asks what’s the matter, and it’s a minute or more before I can even get it together enough to realize that I was dreaming and I’m awake and not really blind and that I’m crying for no reason, then to tell my girlfriend about the dream and get her input on it. Then all day at work then I’m incredibly conscious of my eyesight and my eyes and how good it is to be able to see colors and people’s faces and to know exactly where I am, and of how fragile it all is, the human eye mechanism and the ability to see, how easily it could be lost, how I’m always seeing blind people around with their canes and strange-looking faces and am always just thinking of them as interesting to spend a couple seconds looking at and never thinking they had anything to do with me or my eyes, and how it’s really just a lucky coincidence that I can see instead of being one of those blind people I see on the subway. And all day at work whenever this stuff strikes me I start tearing up again, getting ready to start crying, and only keeping myself from crying because of the cubicles’ low partitions and how everybody can see me and would be concerned, and the whole day after the dream is like this, and it’s tiring as hell, my girlfriend would say emotionally draining, and I sign out early and go home and I’m so tired and sleepy I can barely keep my eyes open, and when I get home I go right in and crawl in bed at like 4:00 in the afternoon and more or less pass out.
THE DEPRESSED PERSON
The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing emotional pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror.
Despairing, then, of describing the emotional pain or expressing its utterness to those around her, the depressed person instead described circumstances, both past and ongoing, which were somehow related to the pain, to its etiology and cause, hoping at least to be able to express to others something of the pain’s context, its — as it were — shape and texture. The depressed person’s parents, for example, who had divorced when she was a child, had used her as a pawn in the sick games they played. The depressed person had, as a child, required orthodonture, and each parent had claimed — not without some cause, given the Medicean legal ambiguities of the divorce settlement, the depressed person always inserted when she described the painful struggle between her parents over the expense of her orthodonture — that the other should be required to pay for it. And the venomous rage of each parent over the other’s petty, selfish refusal to pay was vented on their daughter, who had to hear over and over again from each parent how the other was unloving and selfish. Both parents were well off, and each had privately expressed to the depressed person that s/he was, of course, if push came to shove, willing to pay for all the orthodonture the depressed person needed and then some, that it was, at its heart, a matter not of money or dentition but of “principle.” And the depressed person always took care, when as an adult she attempted to describe to a trusted friend the circumstances of the struggle over the cost of her orthodonture and that struggle’s legacy of emotional pain for her, to concede that it may very well truly have appeared to each parent to have been, in fact, just that (i.e., a matter of “principle”), though unfortunately not a “principle” that took into account their daughter’s needs or her feelings at receiving the emotional message that scoring petty points off each other was more important to her parents than her own maxillofacial health and thus constituted, if considered from a certain perspective, a form of parental neglect or abandonment or even outright abuse, an abuse clearly connected — here the depressed person nearly always inserted that her therapist concurred with this assessment — to the bottomless, chronic adult despair she suffered every day and felt hopelessly trapped in. This was just one example. The depressed person averaged four interpolated apologies each time she recounted for supportive friends this type of painful and damaging past circumstance on the telephone, as well as a sort of preamble in which she attempted to describe how painful and frightening it was not to feel able to articulate the chronic depression’s excruciating pain itself but to have to resort to recounting examples that probably sounded, she always took care to acknowledge, dreary or self-pitying or like one of those people who are narcissistically obsessed with their “painful childhoods” and “painful lives” and wallow in their burdens and insist on recounting them at tiresome length to friends who are trying to be supportive and nurturing, and bore them and repel them.