Through The Weekend

Blikes! What a difference a day makes. Yesterday, the family kept me as busy as I-don't know-what. Today, they all pretty much gave me the finger from dawn to dusk.

To kick off hectic Saturday, I took Edwin to Seattle Art Museum. We had a free pass, thanks to this program. I presented it at the admissions desk with -- as does anyone with a free pass to any attraction -- the matter-of-fact dignity of some newbie pitching up at a speakeasy.

What did our lad find most impressive? Do Ho Suh's armor jacket of 40,000 military dog tags, Some/One. It pools across the floor like the tutu of a curtsying ballerina. Edwin got on his hands and knees to inspect the random letters punched onto each tag.

I loved a palm-sized ivory panel, about 800 years old, Siege In The Garden of Love. In this French (there's your clue) carving, "earnest" knights are trying to get into a castle from which young ladies are showering rose petals upon them. But, let's be frank, neither the boys nor the girls look as though they have sweated over tactical maps, or chewed tobaccy while barking at sergeants. They all look about as battle-steeled as couples I've witnessed in hot tubs at a club north of Seattle city limits. And the guy at about eight o'clock: what's that in the basket he's carrying? Ground-to-air missiles? Plastic explosive? No: he has been at Lowe's garden center. He's heard that the dames like roses, and so has been gathering reinforcements while he may.

Later, we all met to watch Edwin's soccer match. Vee gloated from her foldable touchline recliner while Terisa, Scott, Larry and I made ourselves comfortable on hillocks of grass and dog shit. Afterward, Terisa asked me to thieve her a plum from the kids' post-match snacks.
"There is no way I will take food from those children", I told her. "Edwin, go and steal a plum for Terisa."

In the evening we had dinner and watched an advanced screening of Terisa's super new documentary about elder care. Here's a trailer. And so to bed.

Today? Larry came over to watch a DVD with Vee and Edwin. I stood behind them, reaching for my keys. Did any of them want to come with me to the grocery store?
"Nope."
"No, thanks."
"Nah."
So I texted Terisa the same question. Reply:
"Sorry. I'm in the middle of something".
Okay. Did anyone want anything bought and ferried back -- by me -- to the laps of their sedentary selves, from said grocery store?
"Uh-uh."
"No."
"We're good."

I tiptoed out. Ah, well: bless them, I thought. As long as they're enjoying their Sunday. The miserable bastard ingrates.

Via The Kiwis (Part Two)

"I miss the barefoot thing," I told Vee, glancing down at our son's small feet as he played on the floor of our new Seattle apartment. We found each other's hand.

We all missed the barefoot thing. In New Zealand, children trot about without shoes or socks. We also missed our lemons: our Waikato cottage had a tree of them plumb-spang in the middle of the front yard (see photo). Those were fucking big lemons, we reflected.

Now, Vee and I were looking out onto a beard of Seattle snow. No year-round pails of citrus here. But this snow, to give ourselves a libidinal pat on the back, hadn't stilled our sex lives with the embarrassing ease with which it had paralyzed cars.

For ages, if you recall, neither of us had taken advantage of our agreement that -- because of our work-related distance from each other in NZ -- it would be okay if one of us fancied a roll in the hay with someone else. Since we had been back together, though, we had  enjoyed a succession of flings. Why? It was just part of our turbulent landing. The anger, globe-trotting, and tears were gone. Vee had also carried back from Auckland the party oomph of her last few weeks there, when she’d come close to cart-wheeling into bed with several blokes.

So we dusted off our deal, in much the same way that a losing cup-final team might decide to keep its pub booking and enjoy a consolation shindig anyway. Talking of shindigs: I’m mighty proud to say that, on the nights that she and I snuck over icy sidewalks to the Capitol Hill clubs, Vee out-danced anyone and everyone until closing. Sometimes, one of her few lingering Terpsichorean peers wanted to take her arm and express his admiration back at his apartment. I say: good on her.

Now, a month or two into this patch of naughtiness, I glanced out at the snow once more before wandering over to the computer. I clicked on my Interests section in Facebook, and – just to see -- typed in polyamory  (as swinging didn’t quite hit the right note for either of us, ongoing). The word turned into a link, which brought up a list of local people who had declared the same interest. Scrolling idly down the page, the profile pic of a beautiful, dark-haired woman whizzed past. I scrolled back up, and did one of those double-take shakes of the head that makes a ding-a-ling-a-ling noise in Warner Bros cartoons. But no: there she still was. Crisp ivory blouse, three-quarter turn to camera, and confident brown eyes that carried a trace of the imploring. Her other interests were an uncanny blend of mine and Vee’s: writing, ballet, comedy, theatre, dogs. She had two long-term partners, Scott and Larry, and her name was Terisa.

I’ve been asked, since, whether I intended to get in her pants from the word go. Hardly. She lived with two terrific, successful guys; she was a filmmaker and actress; and she happily boasted on FB that she enjoyed a “ridiculously pampered, unconventional life”. At best, I thought we could all have a coffee and get some pointers about the Seattle poly community. The only artful thing I did was to get Vee to e-mail her our invitation to meet, on the (correct) assumption that Terisa got lots of pleasant notes from guys. Very  pleasant notes.

She, Scott and Larry said okay, and came to one of the potato-vodka cocktail parties Vee and I had started to throw each month. We got a few dozen pals at these, as a rule, but that night they were the only guests except our good friends Anna and Tav.

I gave Terisa props on the excellence of the English accent she feigned for her role in Family. She thought I was taking the piss out of her, and told me graciously – in my own home, don’t forget – that I was full of shit.

We liked the three of them, but after they left I fumed at poor Vee that Terisa had not even given me a civil goodnight hug. I do believe I punched the wall, too, and slammed choice doors. Terisa had got in amongst me. Vee said not to worry: that Terisa had teased me a lot, which was a good sign. Yes, even I could see that. Perhaps. The next morning, Sunday, I was clinging to that possibility. But all we exchanged with Terisa and the guys were polite thanks. Oh, shittypugs.

Mid-afternoon on the Monday, during a work meeting, I got a one-line text: “I’ll do my English accent for you, if you’ll do your American accent for me.”
Well, now. Someone on a scholarship at Understatement University might observe that this was a fairly notable digital communication in my life.

Crikey, yes. Quite notable.

Via The Kiwis (Part One)

Six years ago, Vee and I were barely seeing eye to eye.

In a sense, we were closer than we had been at any point during our married lives. We needed to be: a few months previously we had moved from Seattle to New Zealand, with two-year-old Edwin. We had brought only what we could carry. Everything else? Sold or given to friends. Ev-er-y-thing. Every last syllable.

Soon after emigrating, determined not to squander our meager savings on Auckland rent, I suggested that we put a deposit down on a house in a more affordable area. Well, okay. But that house turned out to be a cottage three hours south, smack-bang in dairy country. And, at about that time, Vee won a lecturing contract smack-bang in Auckland city.

Ah.

Vee, focused on her work, started commuting to Auckland for half of each week. I, focused on looking after Edwin among the paddocks and lemon trees, started to get lonely. At the time, though, each of us was happy with our living arrangement. I was tired of being the main bread-winner, and loved spending even more time with our son. She adored her new job.

But for every week she was getting more stimulated by working at a big university, I was getting more starved for company. This prompted me to broach a realistic enough scenario: we had been utterly monogamous and faithful to each other for more than a decade, but were now having to spend many nights apart. So I got a bit Austin Powers on her ass:
"What if one of us -- most likely you, let's face it -- meets someone else and fancies a shag?"
Her response: she shrugged. For months. Absorbed in her job, she just didn't see anything like that happening.

I kept asking about it, on and off. She got annoyed. I did not see that I was becoming a bore, and she did not see why I was becoming a bore. At one point, doubled-up on the edge of the bed, she screamed at me in floods of tears:
“I don’t want  to fuck anyone else! I’m not interested! Understand!?”

After a few months, we agreed that there was just enough chance of one of us wanting sex, or simply warm, naked touch, that we would permit each other to enjoy it if it happened. It didn't seem likely to happen, though: she had no desire, and I had no opportunity. (Besides, at that time I was more sexually intrigued by the idea of her meeting someone else.) But the deal stayed in place after I moved back to Seattle with Edwin for 18 months, while she finished her contract.

Guess what? Neither of us did anything. Not once. Not even when she let hair down and went out clubbing for weekends at a time. Big surprise. Meanwhile, Vee was angry at me for moving back to the 'States so peremptorily. I was frustrated by her almost-total attention to her career.

For political reasons, the tenure she was chasing did not work out. So we all regrouped in Seattle. After a while, Vee and I saw each other's point of view. The bile dissipated, then disappeared.

As to the agreement? That agreement? It stayed. Why? We just looked at it, almost as if it were a curio in a display cabinet, and decided that it might be interesting to keep in place.

Just in case...

(CONTINUES NEXT TIME)

Near The Nightlight

There's nothing vexatious, in principle, about Terisa coming over to our apartment while Vee is out for the evening. Indeed, we usually have a fine time. We hang out with Edwin. We all watch TV. We mill around the kitchen and graze.

This Friday was particularly agreeable because I'd just cooked, so the three of us picnicked on split-pea soup, Irish cheese, and grapes. This, plus watching a half-hour show, dovetailed into Edwin's bedtime. After he'd brushed his teeth, Terisa and I went to his room to keep him company while he read.

Suddenly, as we loafed on his bed, she pointed at his chest of drawers.
"You can thank me for that!" she said.
"Why? Are you a f*cking carpenter?" I felt like asking, but opted instead for assuming she'd bought it for him somewhere back in the fog of time. But, no:
"Not the chest. The sticker on it."
Ah. Got it. When his beloved Seattle Sounders had mailed Edwin a package of goodies after he'd missed their visit to his school, he'd peeled off the branded mailing label with supreme care and stuck it on the front of his sock drawer.
"I taught him the importance of learning his home address, in case he gets lost and has to tell a cop," she went on.
"But mom taught me that!" he chipped in.
"Yes," replied Terisa, "and I  prompted her to teach you. Remember?"
He saw the justice of this.
I asked him to recite the address. Terisa protested that he didn't have to, if he didn't want to, but before she could finish he was reeling it off as piously as if it it were a psalm. We tucked him in and turned on his aquarium nightlight, heaping praise on him for flawless recall.

And then, ladies and gents, came the utterly un-ironic line that defines my girlfriend better than could a thousand lines of biography. Kissing him on the head, checking that his stuffed animals were snug under their blanket, she cooed:
"Next time, I'll teach you what to do if a stranger throws you into the trunk of a car."

Oh, don't be concerned for Edwin. His eyes were shining. As I left the room, my head in my hands, they were in delighted discussion about bound feet kicking out brake lights; the arousal of police suspicion; and reasonable cause for investigation of a vehicle.

Across The Table

How was your childhood?

I had a surprise recently. I'd had no idea that my long-term, but casual, pal Gillian is polyamorous. Nor she, I. But after I told her about working on Family, and after I mentioned Vee and Terisa in the same breath often enough, she made the connection. This gave her the confidence to tell me that she lives with her two male partners. We looked at each other and did some mutual "Good-golly-how-funny,-I'd-never-have-guessed" waggling of heads. We agreed to go for a beer to swap experiences.

A week later we sat opposite each other in a pub on Pike Street, sipping pints. As we chatted, watching locals pant uphill towards Broadway, we stumbled on a set of striking similarities:
Both of us had been brought up in happily monogamous households. Both her parents and mine had been married to their respective spouses for decades. Both of us look back on our childhoods very fondly, and both of us now enjoy broad family support for our relationship choices.

These days, as a woman, Gillian is compassionate and good-humored to a fault; young; athletic; very intelligent and -- by the by -- beautiful. I'm not those things, exactly, but I suppose that I'm not a manic killer hunted in seven states. You can say that much about me.

And we are both poly.

Talking further, we began to touch on the possibility that coming from these particular childhoods, far from leading us robotically to replicate them, might have contributed  to our security in being able to handle multiple partners. (Of course, I specifically am not suggesting that the former is necessary to effect the latter).

Those were a memorable couple of hours in the pub. I hope we get to witness sweaty pedestrians again.

Concerning The Entertainment

Shooting VNN Nicely News
with Scott Campbell (D.P., center) &
Terisa Greenan (Director/Lead, right).
Just look at my dopey, sodding eyes.

As I mentioned a few posts ago, we're back to shooting our wholly agreeable new Web series VNN Nicely News, after a break. It's not polyamory-themed, unlike Terisa's show Family. But this doesn't necessarily mean that there's zero poly content.  'Nuff said.  ;-)

The shooting schedule for VNN  does not have the rhythmic regularity of Family, which had a running series of episode-release dates (Terisa committed to producing an episode every two weeks for a year. She succeeded.) This difference can be a help and a potential hazard, as we strive to keep the writing and production quality as high as we can. Not being tied to constant deadlines means that we can take more time to try to get elements such as scripts and casting spot-on. But, to use a greyhound-racing term, the lack of the constant 'electric hare' of an episode schedule sometimes makes us feel like we need to warm up again each time we -- say -- co-write a scene or audition actors.

We're still determined not to compromise, though. We've had a couple of near misses so far this summer, and have tried to learn from them. On one occasion I, in my role as a producer, asked director Terisa to fire me from my role as actor in a scene. She agreed: I was just not good enough for that particular segment. I was pretty bloody crap, in fact. It would have been convenient to use me, but the scene would have suffered big-time. So we kicked me out, which also had the effect of making me feel a little better when it comes to making the same kind of judgment about other people. :-) Plus, the actor we cast instead is terrific. (At one point I took me by the elbow, pointed at him, and whispered to myself: "There, you skinny English twat: THAT'S how it's supposed to be done.")

Terisa and I think we are working well as collaborators on VNN.  We're certainly enjoying ourselves like sailors at a dockside tavern. I suppose that, in the past, we have been good, respectful creative partners anyway. Terisa's handle on Family, especially the three lead characters, sometimes led to her giving my co-writing contributions the skunk eye. Quite rightly. And it would not have behooved me to be thin-skinned or huffy.
On VNN  she is still director, editor, and main producer, but the scripts and characters are coming chiefly from my desk. So the creative bluntness is now more two-way. But even when we have had tense talks with each other, and whoever has 'won' any given VNN  dispute, thus far we have agreed on the quality of the finished scene. Hopefully, that pattern will continue. We'll see.

From The Ringside

Our family is:
Irresponsible. Immoral. Weird. Over-sexed. Terrible parents. Infection-ridden. Adulterers. Potential jealous murderers. Some critics weep about us, others think we're hefty contributors to the End of Days. We men are everything from the world's most beta males -- pussy-whipped ad nauseam -- to shag-happy grade-A shits. (I do believe those are all the chief orifices covered in half a sentence.) Oh, and the women? Sluts, control freaks, or both.

That's what some commenters and commentators have said about us.
Lor' love a duck! If I want to hear that kind of language, I can get it at home.

I've been chatting about all this with Terisa. She -- and Scott & Larry, but she perhaps in particular -- has been a target much longer than I.
"Does it bother you, even a little bit?" she asked.
"No," I said. "Besides, they don't know us personally."
I was tempted to say that I'd always rather people would say something nice instead (or at least pick up young Edwin's bar tab once in a while). But even that's not true: not in the advocacy sense. We're trying to show that polyamory can work okay in a regular street, with regular people, and that there's no need to hush it up. This is a wee bit off the grid, so it'd be suspicious to hear only approval. Nobody kicks a dead dog, right?

But there is one kind of angst about us that could be more demoralizing, if allowed to be so.
It is the kind that I'm not sure is even there. I catch it out of the corner of my eye, but can't quite locate it if I look straight at it. It bothers me more if it emanates from friends and colleagues. It's best described as a suspicion that, in some muddy way, we have let the side down or gone strange. That we are like a drunk from whom, for now, it is best to tiptoe away until he has slept it off.
This can be hard to handle, because it is hard to address. Perhaps people are staying quiet because they are simply too busy to care. Actually, I'm certain this is often the case. But with other folks, broaching the whole issue with them can seem self-conscious. So I just let it be. I figure they'll come and chat, if they feel like it. Meanwhile, perhaps they'll get the occasional glimpse of us with our partners when we  don't think anyone's looking: at the grocery store, or whatever. Hopefully, that will say a thing or two.

There are also the boatloads of support we have.
Quite apart from which, there's another reason why I try not to grumble about negative comment. That is: we've kinda asked for it. We could have stayed private, but chose to stick our heads above the parapet. This does not excuse irrational or hateful content in the brickbats leveled at us. But I guess we knew that people would gnash their teeth and turn the air a vivid blue. Fair enough, guv.

Down The Stick

I've been teaching Edwin how to use a knife.

He wanted to sharpen the end of a stick. He'd found it in the park while playing with his friends, then brought it home and got busy with a Sharpie. The stick is now his Commander Dagger. It needed to live up to its title, so we went and sat on the steps leading down to the park outside our house. I was drinking a can of lager, and grabbed a beer mat to place over the aperture so any dipsomaniac fruit flies would not glide in and then giggle and then drown.

We perched on squished cherries on the steps. I handed him our vegetable knife (my Swiss Army chum was AWOL.) I showed him how to hold his thumb underneath the wood, the deftest angle at which to hold the blade and -- all together now -- to sweep it away from his body. Tapping the beer mat on my can, I watched him.

Thing about sitting with your boy, whittling sticks, is that it puts a big fat jaunty arrow above your head: "Dad and son". Even more so than if Edwin were wobbling on a bike, an adult hand disengaging from the saddle. Heck, any hick uncle can learn a kid how to bicycle. But endowing a twig with enough of a point to penetrate the fleshy parts? Father.