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Part Two: Good Heavens
For personal reasons, Dr Jekyll was absolutely fixated on the idea of nerdy conventions, attending Dragon*Con being a repeated fantasy he had. Year after year he would talk about it, year after year he would never go, year after year it was just like this THING.
In 2012, I was 22 and I was stationed in southern Virginia. Dr Jekyll lives in South Carolina. Dragon*Con is in Georgia.
We went.
I thought it had this meeting could have been an email vibes overall, but it wasn't, like a bad meeting. Dull but pleasant, not something I'd do for myself again but something I'd do for someone else (and indeed I am).
But there was a problem. Two.
First, I was young. I did not yet understand that some people are not the captains of their souls. I also have some sort of deep-seated tendency to chivalry, which I now understand is a super obnoxious flaw, but at the time I did not curb it. This is the same twin problem, young and dumb, that got me landed in my first marriage.
I thought: His problem is he wants to go to Dragon*Con. I will solve it by persuading him to go to Dragon*Con.
His problem was not that he wanted to go to Dragon*Con. His problem is that Dragon*Con was a metaphor, or metonymy, for a life free from mental illness, and he is not free from mental illness.
I'm reminded of my ex and her mother, who had this Thing about hallmark holidays. If anything was less than perfect, they'd lose their minds, and they only had one way of perfection. 99% of reality is dealing with the fact it's not what you would like it to be. (Also, I can't help but remember that all the things that went wrong with the holidays at my in-laws' places were caused by the very people who wanted things to go off perfectly.)
Second: I know how the social side of cons work now, and it involves having a large (12ish) circle of friends, at least some of whom are mentally well, preparing months in advance. You can't just walk into room parties, Gordon!! I know that now because I'm organizing one such party. Also, I know that even if you, general, COULD just walk into a room party, you, specifically, WOULDN'T - remember the first night, that pickup game of Mafia? I joined and you didn't?
You fool, you poltroon, you lunatic, I do not sing. I do not dance. At the time, I did not drink.
Anyway:
Seven years of this, and it got increasingly bitter and more pointed. Have I mentioned this guy repeats himself, a lot? Well, SEVEN. YEARS. OF. THIS. Seven Septembers where he had a big meltdown and complained about how boring I was and how much I ruined his life (not that he blames me(!)). I was nice to him about it, too! Whenever he went off on it, I just let him go as I grew in wisdom, and soothed him as best I could.
I no longer have access to the rest of that entry, but he went into detail about how I was just like his mother (you see what happened after I hit a certain age?) and how sexually frigid and unavailable I was, just like all the other girls who wouldn't put out for him.
See, at one point, I don't remember when, we ditched the con and went swimming in the hotel pool. I had, at the time, a two-piece bathing suit, which I wore because it was the only bathing suit I had. This has caused a decade of mental illness to be thrown at me. He hugged me while we were swimming, which I did not mind (I think I might now), and I later learned that he attached an awful lot of significance to the fact it was the most female flesh he'd seen in x number of years, and each year that passed, he got more and more wound up that it had been another x number of years since he had seen female flesh.
Hyde has, as I've said, locked me out of many of his serial killer manifesto ramblings, but I can remember him going on about how my bikini "wasn't sexy - and it wasn't meant to be."
Indeed. I have never worn a swimsuit since. When I swim, which I do frequently, I wear shirts and a t-shirt. He is why.
It got worse.
In 2018/2019 this escalated to the point where he was literally telling me he wished we'd made love in Atlanta, like it was a secret and not something hideously embarrassing I had politely ignored for nearly a decade out of civility. Notes I have indicate he thought feminism did this to me and he could have cured me if he'd been younger - same refrain as the rest of the women in the first post), but he's hidden the full quote from me so I can't show you the crazy.
I am, just so we're clear, a homosexual.
I had to tell him not to send me pornography on my work phone (or, uh, at all). When I mentioned I knew someone who had been raped by someone who is a firefighter, he posted firefighter appreciation cringe and made fun of said rapist's victims. When I posted about this case, he responded:
He didn't let it go, either, for years:
There is, of course, no possible way a decent, sane, or thinking person of any political persuasion or attitude toward "feminism" could look at a scene where A sets B on fire and conclude B is the baddie. It can only snaps into place when you remember that Gordon was then in his mid 50s and hated every single one of his female coworkers, even and especially the ones he wanted to fuck. Rorschach, you see?
So he's a shitshow. I cut back talking to him at around the time I got divorced - a lot of excellent foundation was laid in my staff O years - and started lying to him about how I wasn't available to talk, made up an entire JRTC trip just to give myself a month's break, and, after 18 years or so, quit blogging just to avoid him. When I quit talking about my job, he made up this alternate universe in which being a brigade staff officer was a cruel tragedy and not a normal place for a pre-command captain to be.
He has mistaken my withdrawal from his horseshittery for a descent into mental illness rather than its opposite.
Anyway, eventually he told me that I looked bad without my college-length (ass-long) hair - and I told him to fuck off. He has since pretended that it was a compliment and he didn't mean any sexual commentary, but I've read his thoughts on female hair:
I then returned to dreamwidth to tell him off, and I found quite a few exciting entries. Most of them he has since filtered from me (including the "i have somehow given myself a jocasta complex about a lesbian my daughter's age" bit quoted above), but he wrote some elaborate fanfiction on how unhappy I was in my marriage - specifically, that I was unhappy because I was married to an American millenial woman (he did, eventually, remember that I am also an American millenial woman - as you'll see), and that if we'd lived in a nice world where feminism didn't do this kind of thing, he could have taken me in hand.
(Mr Hyde appears never to have understood that I dated a man, that indeed I was dating a man when we met. I sent said man a copy of the rape screenshots, which I'll get to, and my ex bf absolutely flipped out. Thank me, Gordo, for not sending an American millenial man to your home address. Even if you lost twenty years, he would still have several inches and an easy fifty pounds of muscle on you.)
At the time, this was in 2019, and I laid some facts out for him, I told him
I then logged out of DW, returning occasionally to delete entries and put them on my new blog, but not returning to his blog. Until today, I hadn't seen his responses, and I was not prepared for what the "twisted into something stupid" proved to be.
You never understood the context of that "gentle, people-pleasing person," you've been chewing cud over for more than a decade, did you? Do you not remember the context? I was reflecting on how my anger, sense of justice, and regrettable disposition to "chivalry" could co-exist with a temperament disinclined to ever voice them.
Anyway, remember the last part of this story? The one where the horrible bitch gets hers in the end - Natalie's alcoholism, Ashe's weed-smoking, Melissa dying cold and alone while her two children ignore her?
Well, here's the thing about that.
Nothing bad happened to me!
But he wishes it did. Oh, he wishes so hard.
He has, over the years, fantasized about me killing myself.
Nothing bad happened to me, but the pattern couldn't complete if I were perfectly fine and just living on my own without him and happily with my fiancee, so Gordon made something bad up to punish me.
Remember how I said he hates lesbians? That he's a homophobe? Yeah. My marriage was real - fortunately, so was my divorce. It's weird how he's acting like there's an attempt to suppress gay divorce statistics. Does he not know what google is? Very possibly not.
You guys ready for this?
It's funny how he spent so much time wailing about women making False Accusations...and then made one up himself.
I am not and have never been a member of the people who have been raped party. The closest I have ever come, and likely ever will come, is reading this post. You really have thought about it, haven't you? All the little details, all the delightful political implications? Did you touch your pee pee while you thought it out, or does it just read that way?
Was it after your 1,758th Dragon*Con post, or after you sent me pornography while I was at work?
Oh, my God. This is a common R2KBA talking point, how did you fuck it up so bad.
Per se? I didn't, and I still don't...You, specifically, well. Not until I read this.
I can't believe you think I was raped...and write about it like this.
Without any irony, he notes
Oh, I'm here. Always have been, Edward. It's just people who don't trespass against my self have my friendship now. You were in, but you behaved so badly you forced yourself out, you see?
One might think that, if one were on the receiving end of the fifth or sixth "dear sir, cease and desist your insanity" note from a young female, one might be prompted to wonder if one's own behavior might have been to blame. But no - there are is only ONE reason that a woman might not want to sit at your table, and that is the reason that she was raped. Raped into showing her naturally hateful disposition.
I was more wrong about you than I ever knew - you are a monster.
In 2012, I was 22 and I was stationed in southern Virginia. Dr Jekyll lives in South Carolina. Dragon*Con is in Georgia.
We went.
I thought it had this meeting could have been an email vibes overall, but it wasn't, like a bad meeting. Dull but pleasant, not something I'd do for myself again but something I'd do for someone else (and indeed I am).
But there was a problem. Two.
First, I was young. I did not yet understand that some people are not the captains of their souls. I also have some sort of deep-seated tendency to chivalry, which I now understand is a super obnoxious flaw, but at the time I did not curb it. This is the same twin problem, young and dumb, that got me landed in my first marriage.
I thought: His problem is he wants to go to Dragon*Con. I will solve it by persuading him to go to Dragon*Con.
His problem was not that he wanted to go to Dragon*Con. His problem is that Dragon*Con was a metaphor, or metonymy, for a life free from mental illness, and he is not free from mental illness.
I'm reminded of my ex and her mother, who had this Thing about hallmark holidays. If anything was less than perfect, they'd lose their minds, and they only had one way of perfection. 99% of reality is dealing with the fact it's not what you would like it to be. (Also, I can't help but remember that all the things that went wrong with the holidays at my in-laws' places were caused by the very people who wanted things to go off perfectly.)
Second: I know how the social side of cons work now, and it involves having a large (12ish) circle of friends, at least some of whom are mentally well, preparing months in advance. You can't just walk into room parties, Gordon!! I know that now because I'm organizing one such party. Also, I know that even if you, general, COULD just walk into a room party, you, specifically, WOULDN'T - remember the first night, that pickup game of Mafia? I joined and you didn't?
Where are “the memories of a lifetime” I’m supposed to have, of going with my friend Kate to Dragon*Con? The musicians, the magicians, the artists, the celebrity guests - where were they? My old high school class-mate Tom Smith, the Tom Lehrer of his generation - Kate would have got a huge kick out of his material, she’d have picked up and followed it without difficulty where her “peers” would have been baffled… I haven’t seen him in thirty years. He was there, according to the souvenir guidebook I have. It’s about all I do have… Make that, thirty years and counting.
Where are the room parties? The filking? The dancing, the (social) drinking? Where are my memories of Kate grinning delightedly and joining with the audience in the chorus?
You fool, you poltroon, you lunatic, I do not sing. I do not dance. At the time, I did not drink.
Anyway:
What the hell happened?
Well, frankly, Kate happened. That the science fiction convention I’d waited for twenty irreplaceable years to experience with a proper companion, imploded into “just another empty, solitary, pointless, missed-out botch” was Kate’s doing - yet it is not merely that I am a gentleman that I have never held her to blame.
Seven years of this, and it got increasingly bitter and more pointed. Have I mentioned this guy repeats himself, a lot? Well, SEVEN. YEARS. OF. THIS. Seven Septembers where he had a big meltdown and complained about how boring I was and how much I ruined his life (not that he blames me(!)). I was nice to him about it, too! Whenever he went off on it, I just let him go as I grew in wisdom, and soothed him as best I could.
Matters are only slightly improved by my pointing out that it all fit so perfectly that it appeears to be fated so, that in this my 50th birthday commemoration Kate played every significant female role in turn
I no longer have access to the rest of that entry, but he went into detail about how I was just like his mother (you see what happened after I hit a certain age?) and how sexually frigid and unavailable I was, just like all the other girls who wouldn't put out for him.
See, at one point, I don't remember when, we ditched the con and went swimming in the hotel pool. I had, at the time, a two-piece bathing suit, which I wore because it was the only bathing suit I had. This has caused a decade of mental illness to be thrown at me. He hugged me while we were swimming, which I did not mind (I think I might now), and I later learned that he attached an awful lot of significance to the fact it was the most female flesh he'd seen in x number of years, and each year that passed, he got more and more wound up that it had been another x number of years since he had seen female flesh.
Hyde has, as I've said, locked me out of many of his serial killer manifesto ramblings, but I can remember him going on about how my bikini "wasn't sexy - and it wasn't meant to be."
Indeed. I have never worn a swimsuit since. When I swim, which I do frequently, I wear shirts and a t-shirt. He is why.
It got worse.
In 2018/2019 this escalated to the point where he was literally telling me he wished we'd made love in Atlanta, like it was a secret and not something hideously embarrassing I had politely ignored for nearly a decade out of civility. Notes I have indicate he thought feminism did this to me and he could have cured me if he'd been younger - same refrain as the rest of the women in the first post), but he's hidden the full quote from me so I can't show you the crazy.
I am, just so we're clear, a homosexual.
I had to tell him not to send me pornography on my work phone (or, uh, at all). When I mentioned I knew someone who had been raped by someone who is a firefighter, he posted firefighter appreciation cringe and made fun of said rapist's victims. When I posted about this case, he responded:
Just what does it take to push a man fifty-four years old - we're not talking a hormone-raddled teenager, here! - who has worked at his current posting for four years apparently without incident, to attempt to roast and carve his female-half-his-age supervisor like a Thanksgiving turkey?
What he did was crazy AND stupid, no argument there. He should have simply smiled, put in his two weeks' notice and quit… and then waited a year. “Dish best served cold” and like that. To do something this self-destructively extreme must have involved extreme and prolonged provocation.
The impression I get here is not favorable to Lt. Blanchard. Had there been actual murder they might have been forced to take action, but the impression I get is a strong desire from all parties involved for that woman to not exist.
He didn't let it go, either, for years:
“The reaction to a controversy is very often more enlightening and important than the details of the allegations themselves,” Tammy Bruce said, and a clear example is Kate’s blind irrational reaction to that bizarre Leavenworth incident where a privilege-fast-tracked, Peter-principled Army supervisor was finally roasted and carved like a Thanksgiving turkey by a civilian employee twice her age whom she had repeatedly “counseled” but deemed “resistant to supervision” i e uppity. It was intensely obvious in the aftermath that she had brought this on herself; a union boss said as much, and even the investigators excluded and avoided her as much as possible!
But poor Kate sees through new eyeglasses now, and her view was of a blameless plaster saint attacked out of the blue by a fiendish plaster demon, said labels assigned by sex, not fact. (“Of course he’s wrong! He’s a male, isn’t he?” - ’70s “joke” said and meant deadly serious, the origin of “identity politics.”) What’s more, for saying what he did that union boss should be fired! (Yes: Merely expressing an opinion Kate did not like, should be grounds for termination. Zero tolerance. I wonder how she would feel if she lost her job on the same principle?)
There is, of course, no possible way a decent, sane, or thinking person of any political persuasion or attitude toward "feminism" could look at a scene where A sets B on fire and conclude B is the baddie. It can only snaps into place when you remember that Gordon was then in his mid 50s and hated every single one of his female coworkers, even and especially the ones he wanted to fuck. Rorschach, you see?
So he's a shitshow. I cut back talking to him at around the time I got divorced - a lot of excellent foundation was laid in my staff O years - and started lying to him about how I wasn't available to talk, made up an entire JRTC trip just to give myself a month's break, and, after 18 years or so, quit blogging just to avoid him. When I quit talking about my job, he made up this alternate universe in which being a brigade staff officer was a cruel tragedy and not a normal place for a pre-command captain to be.
He has mistaken my withdrawal from his horseshittery for a descent into mental illness rather than its opposite.
Kate and I remained friends, even as she swirled slowly down the drain of mental illness, as she herself recognized. My bright, fun, caring, dear friend fell into shadow and wilted, darkened, withdrew into herself and eventually disappeared. She may technically still be alive - or not! - but certes the Kate I knew exists now only in memory.
Anyway, eventually he told me that I looked bad without my college-length (ass-long) hair - and I told him to fuck off. He has since pretended that it was a compliment and he didn't mean any sexual commentary, but I've read his thoughts on female hair:
I very nearly asked Natalie to tie her hair up. She was wearing it loose as I would have it, and demonstrating why, and it was actually unpleasant - that unstyled, loosely falling, artlessly erotic avalanche of incredibly sexy bed-head hair, smooth yet tousled, that she'd pull back over one ear or toss back over her shoulder as she was bending and working at her tasks, slender and serious and so close yet so far away, and I barely remember how a woman's hair feels
I then returned to dreamwidth to tell him off, and I found quite a few exciting entries. Most of them he has since filtered from me (including the "i have somehow given myself a jocasta complex about a lesbian my daughter's age" bit quoted above), but he wrote some elaborate fanfiction on how unhappy I was in my marriage - specifically, that I was unhappy because I was married to an American millenial woman (he did, eventually, remember that I am also an American millenial woman - as you'll see), and that if we'd lived in a nice world where feminism didn't do this kind of thing, he could have taken me in hand.
(Mr Hyde appears never to have understood that I dated a man, that indeed I was dating a man when we met. I sent said man a copy of the rape screenshots, which I'll get to, and my ex bf absolutely flipped out. Thank me, Gordo, for not sending an American millenial man to your home address. Even if you lost twenty years, he would still have several inches and an easy fifty pounds of muscle on you.)
At the time, this was in 2019, and I laid some facts out for him, I told him
Even now, I'm just writing this for myself. It's pissing into the wind but after the tens of thousands of words you've written condemning me and condescending to me and evaluating my sex appeal and putting me in your fantasies I feel like I deserve to get to finally fucking say something. I know you won't understand any of it, that what you do take away will be twisted into something stupid.
I then logged out of DW, returning occasionally to delete entries and put them on my new blog, but not returning to his blog. Until today, I hadn't seen his responses, and I was not prepared for what the "twisted into something stupid" proved to be.
That’s not Kate: That’s hate. And it was a year ago - a long year about which I know nothing. I would wager my lunch money that she and her friend in Singapore have parted company; all such ‘relationships’ have the tensile strength of pie crust, and the author of the above isn’t the Kate whom [her friend in Singapore] knew, either.
You never understood the context of that "gentle, people-pleasing person," you've been chewing cud over for more than a decade, did you? Do you not remember the context? I was reflecting on how my anger, sense of justice, and regrettable disposition to "chivalry" could co-exist with a temperament disinclined to ever voice them.
Anyway, remember the last part of this story? The one where the horrible bitch gets hers in the end - Natalie's alcoholism, Ashe's weed-smoking, Melissa dying cold and alone while her two children ignore her?
Well, here's the thing about that.
Nothing bad happened to me!
But he wishes it did. Oh, he wishes so hard.
In light of recently discovered information, jeezus gawd that girl is a mess: She has corroded like a burst dry cell battery. It is a testament to her spirit, that she has not yet put a bullet through her head… So far as I know. [...] Charred frozen crash-site wreckage in a howling Arctic wind is all that remains of that today. No military career, no law school - she’s out now and doing some sort of victimocracy “social work,” at my last scanty information, her whole life warped and short-circuited into a narrower darker path of hate and perpetual grievance.
He has, over the years, fantasized about me killing myself.
I do not know if Kate is still alive or not. Most likely she is, but it’s by no means certain: The light of that EXIT sign was in her eyes.
Nothing bad happened to me, but the pattern couldn't complete if I were perfectly fine and just living on my own without him and happily with my fiancee, so Gordon made something bad up to punish me.
To paraphrase the Imperial Rescript of Surrender, the military situation has developed not necessarily to Kate’s advantage, while the general trends of her life have all turned against her interest [...] so now [she's] leaving, with none of her planned goals achieved.
And moreover, with her personal life heavily damaged. Not only did her sterile, hostile, ersatz “marriage of convenience” fall apart - as we’re not to know how many do, and that very suppression speaks for itself! - but worse.
Remember how I said he hates lesbians? That he's a homophobe? Yeah. My marriage was real - fortunately, so was my divorce. It's weird how he's acting like there's an attempt to suppress gay divorce statistics. Does he not know what google is? Very possibly not.
I base what follows on very few data, on a hunch - but it explains much, including observed changes in her behavior and that “active-duty retirement”:
You guys ready for this?
I suspect that Kate was raped.
It's funny how he spent so much time wailing about women making False Accusations...and then made one up himself.
I do not say “sexually assaulted,” for that is too vague, applying to the mere attempt also - and if Kate had fought off her attacker she’d have crowed like Peter Pan, waved the bloody shirt, raised hell.
She didn’t - because she didn’t.
Kate knows hand-to-hand combat and was a young athlete, but so was the larger stronger faster aggressive natural born warrior who, if I'm right, forcibly shattered the egalitarian make-believe of shapeless pajama uniforms and “gender-norming” to exercise a primal desire as old as warfare - to give the stagnant genetic cauldron a brisk stir! [She’d mentioned at one point that for all her workouts the guys who lifted her bodily off the ground for team photos made her seem like a child. Aren’t child soldiers “expressly against the law of arms”? (Henry V - Act 4, Scene 7)]
I am not and have never been a member of the people who have been raped party. The closest I have ever come, and likely ever will come, is reading this post. You really have thought about it, haven't you? All the little details, all the delightful political implications? Did you touch your pee pee while you thought it out, or does it just read that way?
I have an idea of when it happened, and saw what it did to the Kate I knew.
Was it after your 1,758th Dragon*Con post, or after you sent me pornography while I was at work?
“I will have to carry a gun solely to defend myself against random men,” Kate told me. Solely. Random. Any man. Every man. A gun.
Oh, my God. This is a common R2KBA talking point, how did you fuck it up so bad.
This was not the Kate I knew, who bore men no ill will per se and was often wryly amused by “Army men” and their attitudes. Something had gone very badly wrong - and like broken branches and gouged ground, the damage it did and the direction it came from are both visibly obvious.
Per se? I didn't, and I still don't...You, specifically, well. Not until I read this.
…“‘Sweet sixteen’s turned thirty-one,’ an’ it shows,” Lydia said. (Editor's Note: For him, it really is all about the age. Physical age and ill usage - i.e. rape - is what got me here!) “Th’ friend you remember is awreddy long gone, if you hadden’ noticed. An’ she idden’ ever comin’ back.”
“… Lucy,” I said, synapses almost audibly clicking. “Lucy Westenra.”
Lydia simply looked on, waiting.
“Dracula. Lucy was nineteen, and her best friend was Mina.”
“‘Estu lumo,’” Lydia intoned, nodding slowly. “And Lucy was destroyed.”
“She became the Bloofer Lady,” I said. “The change was not an improvement!”
“You know what straw dropped the marbles? She’d said she didn’t like growing her hair out, and I told her, “The only woman I’ve ever seen who didn’t look better with longer hair - and I include you! - was Audrey Hepburn.”
“‘Yeah, fuck off,’” Lydia finished. I grimaced.
“That was such a disconnect, I really did think she meant that for someone else!”
“… Maybe she did,” Lydia said quietly.
Not heeding, I plunged on. “And she tells me I’m crazy? A woman who responds to a sincere and encouraging compliment on her appearance with an obscenity, might not be the best adjudicator on what constitutes sanity, y’ know?”
“… Y’ know, honeybun, that’s been true for quite a while,” Lydia said in that same quiet tone. “Even when she was ‘Lucy,’ she still had more issues than National Geographic. Her name rhymes with ‘hate,’ and now she speaks of ‘soul cancer,’ and that’s how she described a friend who shot herself. This ‘Lucy’ didn’t need Dracula - she’s had the Bloofer Lady inside her all along! Y’ know?” She flicked an ash from the cigarette she wasn’t smoking, and it evaporated in midair. “Whatever that was happen’d to her in th’ Army, only made it worse.”
“… Wow,” I said again. Much of LYDIA.DOS was based on psychotherapy programs, and her own personality meshed well with that. The result was often insightful.
“All you can do is what she’s tellin’ you - go away. Life goes on - but relationships, here an’ now… don’t.” Lydia sat forward and looked straight at me.
“Remember Lucy. Remember the fun, funny, caring, charming friend you once knew. Stay away from the Bloofer Lady.”
“… Words to live by,” I said.
I can't believe you think I was raped...and write about it like this.
Without any irony, he notes
I miss my clever, caring, dear friend.
Oh, I'm here. Always have been, Edward. It's just people who don't trespass against my self have my friendship now. You were in, but you behaved so badly you forced yourself out, you see?
One might think that, if one were on the receiving end of the fifth or sixth "dear sir, cease and desist your insanity" note from a young female, one might be prompted to wonder if one's own behavior might have been to blame. But no - there are is only ONE reason that a woman might not want to sit at your table, and that is the reason that she was raped. Raped into showing her naturally hateful disposition.
I was more wrong about you than I ever knew - you are a monster.