Rest in Snuggles, Pagan Boy

 

I so, so wish I’d written him his High Fidelity paragraphs before he passed away from Covid-19 two weekends ago. I think he’d have liked them, especially the smutty parts. More than anything, he deserved to know how important he was to me, how he has built and structured my life since I was 19. I miss him so, SO much. I’m having a rare moment of not knowing what to say.

 

Pagan Boy and I dated (though I don’t know if we’d have called it that) on and off from roughly (ha) 1993 to 1995. I think? I met him during the Perfectly 1993 Guy months and he gorgeously helped me to pick up the pieces after Perfectly 1993 Guy was gone. (Well not all the way gone. They seldom are.)

 

Some decade-plus amount of time later, Pagan Boy moved to the same town as my sister, so he and I sometimes got to have flirty coffee when Sweetie and I were visiting the family. I was delighted to learn we had both grown up to be poly, though I think it stuck a little better for him. He was always the same, so giant, so warm, such a twinkle in his eye—it’s no wonder his pagan friends called him “Pan.” He was like a walking Tom Robbins novel but without all the pesky gender essentialism. Or something like that.

 

I love(d) him so, so much, that slightly sparky friend-love that has run through so many of my friendships with guys.  When we dated, the connection was undressing-each-other-on-the-way-up-the-stairs-to-his-apartment passionate, but the connection between us could never quite gel, could never really decide what it was. I realized years later that we’d both been navigating depression brains, without the words or resources to deal with depression that we would both eventually find. We were both so sad and so in love with life at the same time—what if we’d found a way to lean on each other? I guess we sort of did.

 

Anyway back then, we’d spend lighthearted hours having sex or watching Mystery Science Theater, but also so much time in a semi-stupor wrapped in blankets on the living room floor in front of the TV. The curtains were so often drawn against some sunny day I felt like we should be out in. We were the living enactment of what The Smiths meant when they sang about “spending warm summer days indoors,” and you know I’ve been known to commit some frightening verse.

 

As lovers (sorry, there’s not a better word) we were (comet) Pluto-a slanted orbit out off kilter with each other, emotionally and physically in the same solar system but also not. I wanted to be a real girlfriend, I did try, but something always held us both back. He broke things off with me the same day I painted him The Moon Card. We were The Moon Card. When I’m done writing this I’ll Google and remind myself what that means.

 

It’s weird (or not, see also: Sweetie) to begin with such a sense of naked, confusing turmoil and end in such a place of certainty and grace. Here in 2021, we were texting through bad movies together. I was wondering if I could also ask if he’d like to sext. (A fellow switch, I know he’d have been GOOD at it.) The last thing he sent me, after rescheduling a movie plan during his Covid treatment, was one of those Messenger heart things that explodes into a bunch of floaty hearts when you open it. It was exactly perfect, exactly him.

 

I have this picture, a selfie of him and me at my mom’s Christmas party in 2014. You can see the warmth and softness pouring off of him, the calm happiness in both of our faces, maybe partly because we were both full of my mom’s Christmas toffee. (It’s a lot of loss in one selfie, a lot that the last six years have taken away.) Toffee or no, you can see the warmth in his eyes, a love that wasn’t just for me or my family but for everyone and everything in the world. Outside our mopey post-teenage years, I’ve never seen him look at me any other way.

 

He is SO handsome in the picture that I wonder a little what kept me from being with him. We weren’t good for each other, but also, we were. I love and miss him so, so much and I know I’ll have a lot more to say.

 

 

Fell in Like with The Drummer, Part Four: OMG Holding Hands!!!!!

 

 

The Saturday after New Years, we had our first in-person date. The Drummer was coming into town from the suburbs to meet me at my favorite gentle hiking spot in a nearby state park. I picked out a red lace dress to wear under my warm fuzzy black coat with black leggings and worn-out black Chuck-Taylor-like lowtop sneakers. (Those were DEFINTELY no match for the cold muddiness of the trails!)

 

It was weird to get ready for a date without lipstick, and my old safer-sex anxieties seemed minute compared to the fear that this so-called liberal might somehow show up without a mask like surprise! No science! I sent him a here’s what-I-look-like-with-half-a face pic and quickly got one back. We both prefer bandannas, very we’re-all-Antifa-now.

 

As I sat on a wooden fence rail waiting for him, I felt frozen with nervousness. Also, with cold, fretting about the fraught etiquette of maybe needing to blow my nose during the date without seeming like I was gonna breath-murder him. If I went in for a hug, would I seem wildly irresponsible? If I declined a kiss later, would he think I didn’t like him? I felt a little lost without my in-normal-times general sluttiness to rely on!

 

Because I am me, I already fully liked him before he came walking up the trail, but also, he was all the way cute. He was a little taller than me and not as fat, but very solidly built. I’m generally a little afraid of white dudes (I mean, have you seen America?) but his forty-something-ex-hardcore-kid-ness put me at ease, especially his vague and lovely tattoos. His dark green fedora, rather than making him look sketchy, made him look dapper and like he definitely cared about this date! (Scream emoji!)

 

He leaned in for a hug and I couldn’t help but say “You’re actual!”

 

We talked easily, especially for walking six feet apart! I snuck glances at his hands, big and warm-looking, open and relaxed at his side like an invitation, or at least not NOT an invitation! 

Fell in Like with The Drummer, Part Three: Hot Nap Pic

 

**********Incredibly sad synchronicity alert: Pagan Boy, who was next in line in my ersatz High Fidelity thread, my friend of 28 years and one of my most formative boyfriends, passed away of complications from Covid over the weekend. I found out while this draft was on the desk waiting to be typed. I say synchronicity because The Drummer woke up such a hankering for chatting through bad movies that I drafted Pagan Boy into the madness. Before he was gone, I got to mock Dear Christmas (my choice) and Five-Headed Shark (his) over messenger with him.

 

The Drummer has gently ghosted by now (Well I HOPE he ghosted and didn’t, you know, die.) but even aside from the copious cuteness he provided, I’m so, so grateful he led me to those good hours with Pagan Boy. I miss them both a bunch and I’m basically pining like Wonder Woman over here.***********

 

Back to December:

 

One of the side effects of being underemployed, traumatized by America, estranged from part of my family and also possibly being part bear is that I’ve really ramped up my nap-taking. With that comes a little bit of nap-guilt, especially while I was in touch with riskily not-underemployed The Drummer. Ask me about my NAPS FOR ALL platform.

 

Nap-guilt notwithstanding, I asked The Drummer one Friday afternoon if I should do something productive (I WAS, despite all of the above, nonetheless in full Virgo goalsetting/Tidying Up/budgeting mode) or take a nap.

 

“Nap! Nap! Nap!” he wrote back right away.

 

Inspired, I typed “Hot nap pic in the works”

 

I got into my longjohn-style, vaguely Christmas-themed pajamas, cocooned in the covers, then set about learning portrait mode. The blankets were pulled up over my head, you could only see a fraction of my face, but my vulnerably unglassesed eyes definitely said “Wish you were here.”

Possibly I also typed that.

 

It was a silly, cute, bundled-up picture, but as I noted his kiss emojis and headed toward snoozetown, I felt such a warm wave of joyful desire. It was as if I had just texted him all of the quadrants, naked outside in the sun. It felt new to be so easily and thoroughly turned on in such a time of scary touch-desert. It was an EXTREMELY good nap. Might have to stop writing and go take another.

…

 

Okay I’m back. That weekend, the weekend before Christmas, The Drummer and I had our second text-though-a-bad-movie date, this time with blue speech bubbles instead of Bumble yellow. I thought we had already agreed on Left Behind (Y’all! It’s so much like The Leftovers except really bad and boring and with disconcerting references to “globalism”!) but he seemed taken aback that I was actually willing to go there. This poor guy, he must’ve felt like dating me was a dare.

 

For all the fun and happiness and quipping, bad movies are REALLY LONG without eventually switching to making out. So when he asked me what my choice was for next time, I said a six-feet-apart walk in the woods. And so, after the holidays, that would be our plan.

Fell in Like with The Drummer, Part Two: Kirk Cameron's Saving Christmas

 

 

It was the second weekend of December 2020. I had just pulled off my yearly Christmas gathering via Zoom so the place was decorated and full of beautiful cookies. I was really, really, REALLY excited to text through a bad movie with The Drummer, if a little concerned that I’d gone too far in the BAD direction. Maybe, I thought, not everyone would be entertained by the combination of Tiger Beat heartthrob and mocking Christianity. He’d been doing such a lovely job for a couple of weeks, praising (eee!) my photos of Christmas crafts and keeping me up to date on how cute his dog was being.

 

It was lovely not to feel the press towards sexting that so often comes with online dating. Once, when he said there should be a combination of all the holidays with an orgy post-vaccine, I briefly strayed into tinsel-bondage talk (Pretty image but really terrible idea I’ll bet!) but mostly there was this old-fashioned getting-to-know-each other that I really enjoyed.

 

I knew he deserved better than Saving Christmas but it seemed like good movies were a thing for in-person times.

 

When it was almost time to press play, I put on a pretty sweater and some red lipstick and took a selfie in front of Lenny Spruce, my Christmas tree. (Because of Mrs. Maisel, they’re always named that, but this year it was especially exciting to get an actual spruce!) He (The Drummer, not Lenny Spruce) pronounced the selfie adorable and it was time to start the movie.

 

In the past few weeks, it’s dawned on me that in the MST3K family of products, it’s extremely rare to see not-a-white-man doing the riffing. (S/o to Baron Vaughn the best Tom Servo though!) Sure Felicia Day is sometimes there being awesome and Gypsy got in a rare word or two, but the actual riffing part was something I never considered I might like to do. I may not be funny or clever, I might make too many Midsommar references, but mocking bad movies is the best quarantine hobby I’ve found so far.

 

The Drummer’s sense of humor matched very nicely with mine—a combination of present-day compassion and Gen X irritation. Every once in a while as the quips popped up in the Bumble yellow bubbles I had to just stop and say “OMG I AM SO HAPPY RIGHT NOW” before going back to ironytown. Cute artist drummer guy mocking a terrible movie with me while I drank wine and ate Christmas cookies?! Has ANYTHING ever been better? Perfect. Just such a silly respite and joy.

Even better, he ended the conversation by:

1.      Asking me to pick the next movie.

2.      Mentioning that Left Behind is a trilogy

And

3.      A kiss emoji.

 

I gave him my number and we joked that this could either lead to a Growing Pains podcast or a cult, or both. OH The Drummer, you are such a gift and a treat.

Perfectly 1993 Guy, Part Eight

 

 

Okay I’m writing three different stories at once right now but that’s gonna have to be okay. I think this story might shine some light on the like story I’m currently living about The Drummer.

 

So Perfectly 1993 Guy had started college and I had gone home to live with my dad. We were a six-hour Greyhound trip apart. In those days, well before I could capably drive and when EVER owning a car seemed like a crazy dream, the Greyhound was the route to all things meaningful. Standing at the bus station that Friday night/Saturday early morning waiting for him would’ve felt like I was cracked open and shining love everywhere. That’s a big feeling given that, in this case, my dad must’ve driven me there to pick up my long-distance love, possibly in the middle of the night. It seems to my memory that most Greyhound things in Small Hometown City happened at about 3 AM.

 

Whatever the hour, my blank canvas of a bedroom felt golden with Perfectly 1993 Guy in it. In my arms, kissing and cuddling, he felt so warm but also so evanescent. I’ve never been more aware in my life of how many hours were left until Sunday at 1 PM, when I’d have to say goodbye again.

 

That Saturday night, the midnight between our two birthdays, felt incredibly momentous, sacred, solemn. He had told me a few weeks before that, aside from a just-the-tip occasion with his previous (regular  normal fancy rich person) girlfriend, Perfectly 1993 Guy considered himself a virgin. His first time felt like such a huge deal to him, and I was honored and daunted to be chosen. I felt a little unworthy, given how experimental, reckless, and haphazard I’d been just a few years before. Before my heart pendulum had swung wildly back to the chastity of the Boy Who Sewed Me a Pillow.

 

Before that, though, all afternoon on his birthday, we walked and walked all around Small Hometown City. I showed him a couple of the coffeeshops that I had become completely obsessed with, and which would become my home-away-from-home in years to come. I ordered jasmine tea, which tastes not-great but feels very fancy.

 

We walked and walked and walked. Somewhere in all that love-and-anticipating-goodbyes glow and idle chitchat, I (accidentally?) said “This just feels so temporary.” I don’t think I’d ever seen a man so affected by my careless words, and I maybe haven’t since. He slipped into a silent funk, closing his shoulders off and walking a few feet ahead of me. I remember him (in those dreamy green Docs) climbing up onto the not-very-high ledge of the art museum’s planters, now walking ahead AND above me. He was hurting and escaping, and I didn’t know how to get him back. And we had so, SO little time.

Fell in Like with The Drummer, Part One

 

 

There’s been a guy all month, like a heavily-regional-accented gruff angel, alternately sweet and perfectly pissed off though insurrection season. I’m not sure if it’s still going on, but it’s time to start giving him his due paragraphs!

 

Can’t really have a not-swiping-right-related meet-cute these days, so thanks Bumble. You’re still the least onerous dating app. I liked his profile picture because he had his eyes closed—soulful or just sleepy, either way, I’m in. A sweet, innocent beardy face that, it turns out, looks equally adorable when annoyed. Just like my oldest cat! Best of all, HE’S CLOSE TO MY AGE and there’s nothing in the universe hotter than that.

 

My favorite, favorite FAVORITE thing about when we first started chatting was that he asked after the famous hardcore band from my hometown. Getting to harken back to all-ages shows and mosh pits that worried my mom, ohboy, is there anything cozier? There was something so grounding about this guy, even as the attraction started to muddle my mind right up. (He told me later that HIS hometown all-ages shows in the Nineties had Nazis, and he used to fight them. Picturing this has really been a balm this insurgenty week. Don’t judge my balm! Kamala could have died!)

 

The Drummer and I had so many shared reference points that I was more at ease than one might expect to be in December of 2020! It was sexy, too, in that weird COVID-chaste way that still feels super tricky to figure out.

 

“I’d love to meet you in person,” he typed, “but I’d hate to see you attached to a respirator.”

 

So I asked him to text through a bad movie with me, a quar twist on my very favorite early/always date. (Hi Mayor of Kittentown! Hope you are well! Actually I know you’re well and still very good at Legos because I follow your Instagram!)

 

The Drummer told me I could pick the movie, which maybe would be much to his regret.

I Miss My White Supremacist Mom Part Two

I want to try and piece together the beginning of Covid, familywise. Just before the quar hit, I would have said I was close with my mom and aunts. In February, Sweetie and I spent a day at my late Grandmom’s house, trying to help sort her stuff, which really just boiled down to mom and aunts convincing us to take home a bunch of stuff to ease the burden. I took home many spools of ribbon, a ratty but retro pink towel, trash bags’ worth of silk flowers for art projects, and a random little business card holder that I now use every day for my work Zoomings.

 

Despite Catholicism/conservative politics’ lifelong irking of my soul, I loved my Grandmom so, so much. I felt united in grief with my mom’s generation, intensely aware that I might be doing this sorting in my own mom’s house before too long. That night that we sat around Grandmom’s old table, Favorite Aunt, Beach Aunt, Mom, Sweetie and me, I felt closer with them than I ever had before. I don’t always allow myself family attachment easily, but that night, I was all in. I felt powerfully purposeful and secure, buoyed by these women who’d shaped me all my life. It wasn’t like I forgot politics, but love did let me forgive and transcend.

 

When quarantine came, when I wasn’t taking trauma naps or crying into Zoom, I shifted mightily into tend-and-befriend mode. I checked in daily with family members to make sure everyone was okay, sending (I hope) undemanding good cheer in the form of cats-and-flowers pictures and bird-sightings updates. The first inkling that they were tapped into the disinformation machine was subtle, but it heaved me into reality and a lifetime of stored hurt.

 

My mom was sewing me a gorgeous set of masks, as was Favorite Aunt. While Favorite Aunt griped along about some nebulous “they” forcing us to wear the masks, I thought my mom was mostly in sciencetown with me.

 

But then, in a Messenger thread, I expressed worry about my mom (68) visiting the post office to mail the masks.

 

“Oh, I’m not worried,” she said “I have a really strong immune system, and besides, it’s not like this is the city.”

 

Pretty innocuous, but to me what she said had the bitter sting of racism. It reminded me of back in 2016 when she’d told me that “Rural people are just better with guns than city people are.”

“Sometimes,” I typed as gently as possible, “It comes across as racist when you say things like that.”

 

That concern went unresolved as mom pivoted into her fave form of gaslighting, medical magical thinking that ranges from the victim-blamey to the Eugenic.

 

“I think fear is what’s causing the disease. I wish you weren’t so fearful.”

 

I wasn’t going through my days in fear, at least I didn’t think so. I was listening to poetry from far away, I was taking walks, I was working when I could, I was checking on the neighbors. I was proud of how well I was taking care of myself and Sweetie in such a horrifying month. But all my mom could see in me was weakness and cowardice and self-fulfilling dread. The grief-chasm between who I am and who she thinks I am made me panic and flail like Wile E. Coyote realizing belatedly that he has just walked off a cliff.

I Miss My White Supremacist Mom, Part One

 

I know this is off-topic for the Kitten Calendar and I’m in the middle of some much cuter threads, but I need a place to process this without any family readers and without asking any activist friends to any extra emotional labor. So if you’re reading, thanks! I owe you some fun later on?

 

What do I do with a mother-daughter relationship after mom has informed me that “Reparations would be horrifying” because reports about slavery were exaggerated? Fully, teeth-grindingly estranged, is where. I don’t know what my family life will look like past the protective barriers of Zoom, guess I’d better figure it out. Let’s try to see how we got here.

 

There was a day I’ve already written about some, a day last June when I lost all of my plucky good citizenship and determination. Even my badass block-a-cop-car protester courage was eluding me. The city was under police and military siege, there was still a curfew/quarantine combo making me jump out of my skin, and on top of that a big rainstorm knocked the power out in a way that seemed (but wasn’t, of course) permanent.

 

I went to Sweetie’s to use her Wi-fi for work and ended up breaking down crying because she had neither ground beans nor a scoop to make coffee. I was out of everything that kept me a decent, functioning human, like my own power was out. It was a time I could have used a mom who checks in to see if I’m okay. Sweetie has those kind of parents! Though they are conservative Texans, they do tend to ask after her safety whenever the National Guard is in town (So often it seems like!) and never discourage her from protesting or assume she is a fire-setting looter. They just, you know, parent! Even though she is fifty and really tough!

 

I’m 46 and really tough, and my mom spent all of her energy writing facebook comments about how she “thought I believed in peace” and defending white people in general and her own white-supremacist-leaning (Well, I THOUGHT they were just leaning but it seems they are marching with the Proud Boys tomorrow…) sisters. So many comments until I blocked her, having tried every strategy for years to bring her around. Sometimes I just want to say, fuck off, SURJ, I fucking TRIED.

 

I should have fully blocked her (not just facebook blocked her) back in March 2020 when she started circulating anti-mask disinfo! Or maybe way back in 2016 when she told me I was manifesting rape culture by thinking about it too much. Possibly, I should never have tried to be friends or “friends” with my mom at all, but I kept trying. I still kind of want to try, it’s so hard to stop myself. Psychologists tell that story about the mother who set her son on fire, how he still asked for her.

 

After I ruined Thanksgiving 2016, (which, sorry niece and nephews, NEEDED to be ruined) I eventually responded to mom’s efforts to stay close. (That Christmas, though, I must’ve really given the UPS man a sense of futility when I took mom’s yearly wreath right down to the curb.) Mom’s love language for me is jewelry. If a bracelet broke, I sent her the beads for her jewelry supplies. She repaired all my necklaces for me over the last four years, both ones she designed and ones she hadn’t. I did a very good job of extending and reciprocating love. I’m proud of us both.

 

But my (our) deep wish to be connected was no match for the powerful pull of the Trump/Russia internet (I can just hear her huffing in disbelief, Ugh, Russia, like I made up the Mueller Report) and my conservative aunts, especially as the four of them were still mourning the loss of my Grandmom from summer 2019.

 

This is the story of how helpless I felt, how there was absolutely nothing more I could do, as my mom was swept away. Or maybe she was always that far away to begin with.