Shame (1)

An English professor I know and with whom I occasionally speak encouraged everyone to write the most shameful things they could, because if it is embarrassing to you, it's probably fairly interesting to others, and people will want to read it.

It's also extremely volatile and unsettling, but omelettes and eggs and such.

My name is Daniel Franklin, and I am a ______. Welcome to _______s Anonymous. Take your seat with the others. I think it's when I decided I wanted to write, no matter who read it. I have such dirty things to say, and the saying is empowering.

You take that awful filthy secret and come right out and say it. BAM, out in the open, no holds barred and watch the reader cringe in sublime and delighted revulsion. It's like stepping off a building. Having stepped off a building, I am entitled to the cliche analogy. Read Chuck Palahniuk. It's juicy and wet and tantalizing, raw and fresh and ready to be consumed.

It's also a death knell for relations, private and public, but nothing risked means nothing gained and such.

A minor example:

_______________

I remember the last time I wet the bed. 

It's really the only time I can remember doing it. I was probably about 6 years old, give or take, and I remember it with naked clarity. I was at a hunting lodge in West Virginian with my father, grandfather and two brothers. We didn't hunt, mind you. We just were out in the wilderness doing our thing. I never really understood it, but more and more I have begun to suspect it was as much a vacation for my mother as it was a situation of bonding, which I also never really understood as I never really bonded with anything terribly well throughout my childhood. I was a tiny, scrawny, cheery thing (believe it or not, I really was).

It wasn't much of a lodge, certainly nothing fancy. It was a mostly wooden building. It smelled like wet leaves and wet hair. There was an age-yellowed plastic gallon jug flipped upside down and cut in half attached to a wall in some cramped, pipe filled closet that worked as a urinal. There was an outhouse for if you had to defecate, but I eternally swore to myself I would never go out there after dark. There was a kitchen and table and chairs and a couch and a television where we'd watch the same movies every year that we went. It plays in my memory like a dream that repeats and repeats. We all slept in the same room, a cramped room with beds lining every wall, one bunk bed where my father and grandfather slept.

During the drive down, I drank a 20 ounce bottle of mountain dew. We got there late at night, or at least late enough that it was well after dark. We ate dinner on the way at some rustic, rural diner. Before long went we all went to bed. I used the urinal, but apparently it wasn't enough because I woke up in the dark, laying on my back, the sky just beginning to shift as the first emissary rays of morning light fumbled at the dirty windows.

My bed was soaked, three circles of dripping humiliation. I must have rolled while I peed. The back of my underwear was the wettest by far, something I've always found odd, considering my particular anatomy.

I remember my heart pounding as I snuck through the room in just a t-shirt, shedding my underwear, tighty whities that I knew were now *almost* white, even though in the darkness I couldn't clearly tell. I remember the sounds of the others snoring. I remember slipping the incriminating articles into the dirty laundry, and how little dirty laundry there was. It was our first night there, of course there was only things people had worn the day before. The dirty laundry was in a paper grocery bag, from Food Lion, and I pulled out as much as i could, pushing the evidence down near the bottom. Not on the bottom itself, I didn't want the wetness to seep through the bag, but out of sight. If at first you don't succeed, hide all evidence you failed. Even as a child I was well designed for lying.

I know the hunting lodge smelled like leaves and hair, but when I remember the hunting lodge, I first think of the smell of piss, of those awful three damp patches, of that awful catch in my throat, the awful knowledge that my shame was exposed and painted for everyone to see. It was almost a high; heart-pounding, mind-devouring.

For years I slept with my hand shoved down the front of my pants, cradling myself, telling myself that if my hand were there, the wetness would wake me. That I could stop myself, that I could fix it before it happened again. It still helps me sleep when all else fails. I still don't care much for mountain dew and I can go days without peeing. Not that I'm particularly worried about wetting the bed these days, mind you. I should have a good number of decades before I start up on those shenanigans, and even if not, it's a problem that can be bypassed easily.

________

At the time, it was foul as cowardice, as criminality, as cruelty. It was an admission of a lack of control. It was one of the more horrid things in my life at that point. In retrospect I was laughably innocent. Urination is certainly not a big deal. I have much better shames now, and of that you can be sure. 

Even a lesser shame though, calls for reading. Nothing magnificent, that story told. A spark of interest, but no real electricity. You'd be reading a lot slower, hanging on my every word, if I announced I was a murderer or a pedophile or a whore or told you in detail about erectile dysfunction or how it feels to cut an animal open with a knife or the time I did that thing with you know what to you know who. And no one else ever knew, prior to this revelation.

These are what you'd want to read. Not all of them are all that bad, but they carry that stain of social deviance that perks and piques. Not all of them are true either, mind you. I'm not that interesting. Probably. But are they all false? You have to wonder. A game, then. I played it with my wife's family a while back, and it's fascinating. Truth, truth, lie. Tell three things, make one false. Raise the stakes each time by telling more and more dire truths until someone folds.

Maybe I should choose a few of the higher shames and throw them here, at the risk of horrifying the wife. At least a few Truth-Truth-Lies.

Think of your most staining moment, of the worst thing you've done. The worst lies you've told, the worst things you've seen, and sought, and all the lies you tell yourself to build a barrier between them and the truth. Maybe others know them, maybe they don't. The secrets you bury and pile time and dirt and stone on top of, but you know beneath it they still lie rotting without diminishing, lie festering with disease, and on top of it nothing grows. Nothing ever will. 

They're the moments that will play back through you as you lay on your deathbed, before the dark.

Now go into the bathroom, or somewhere quiet and private with a mirror. Look in the mirror, look yourself in the eyes. Breathe in, breathe out. Look at yourself until you seem almost alien, almost like another's face looking back, and say that shameful creed. Recite them in a list to yourself. Hear them echo in your mind and hear the awful flat way they sound when they fall out from dry lips, a pale imitation of their internal, infernal heat.

It's also pretty catastrophic to the self esteem and such, true... but that professor knows his stuff. That's what to write. To God above, if someone were passing by the door and listening, you know they'd listen hard.