I’m going to play a game with you now. Gonna fuck with your head a bit. Not in any sort of malicious way. It’s actually quite the opposite. Trust me, it’s for your own good. Mostly, it’s for theirs. Which means, it’s definitely for my own good.
You’ve heard of the shell game, right? Three shells and one nut? I’ve also seen it played with small bowls or cups and a marble or some other tiny object. It’s best if the “shells” fit nicely in your hand, because you have to be deft in this game. Deft and quick and really, really sneaky.
Let’s say we have three identical bowls. Small. Pale greenish-blue. Like the kind you might spoon squashy food into for feeding a baby.
That’s really specific, I know. But I want you to be able to envision it.
Let’s turn them upside down on the table and place them between us. Now let’s take a nut. I like almonds. They’re tasty, and they don’t roll around under the cups the way a hazelnut would. (The rolling and a slight sound as it hits the side of the cup could give the game away, you see.)
The game starts when I hold this nut up and call your attention to it. For the sake of the game, we’re going to call him George. I named him this way by closing my eyes, opening up my baby name book, and dropping my pointy-finger onto a random spot on a random page. If the name is a Hells No, I go again until I find the one that hums YESSSS.
I’ve had this book since I was in my 20s, not because I wanted a baby back then. I didn’t. Nope, I got it for randomly choosing fictional names. This book is from the '90s so it’s quite outdated, which actually serves my purposes even better, especially while I’m writing about the '70s and '80s. It’s got a gazillion old-school variants of the names as well, so it makes tweaking names for fantastical characters even easier. It also gives me a boatload of last name options.
I originally used the phone book for all of this character-creation stuff. Of course, the Greater Twin Ports phone book was monstrous. Probably not as monstrous as the one for the Twin Cities. Then again, they probably had to divide theirs into specific cities. Or, you know, lug them with a tow truck.
Anyway, this baby name book has sat on my computer desk, eternally at hand, for decades, but when I used it to come up with George’s name, I wasn’t sitting on my computer chair. I wasn’t even sitting on my patio chair out on the deck, which is where I had my office set up as I originally drafted this post, complete with fan under the computer. See, I was soaking in the last bit of semi-comfortable sunlight while I could, because we were supposed to get up to 107 that week.
But nope, when I opened up my baby name book for this project, I wasn’t in front of the computer. I was on the pot. Since I had re-injured my knee while (miraculously) choreographing for my big Kingkiller dance project,1 my sports med doc had put me on an extra-high dose of glucosamine-MSM-condroitin.
This is because my disks gobble too much of a regular dose to even begin thinking about getting some benefits to things like…oh, limbs. Pffffft. Who needs those when you have a warped spine to heal?
Hence the extra-high dose to spur my body into repairing that meniscus for the third time.
Have you ever taken that stuff triple-strength up to the highest recommended daily dose? Well, I assure you. It’s like trying to drive a dump truck through that windy mountain path after a rain storm, getting it stuck in the mud, and then trying to carry all your crap down from the house so you can cram it into the moving van at the bottom of the mountain.
Nothing Is.
Moving, that is.
Hence, Smooth Move tea. Now, if you’ve ever had the adventure of hiring me for an overseas gig and also housing me in your super awesome guest quarters, you might be aware that I have inherited my father’s digestive tract, not my mother’s. (I’ll take my dad’s intestinal maladies over my mom’s any day.) The paternal line of my family traditionally has a verrrrry…sloooow…system. So add the highest recommended daily dose of glucosamine-MSM-condroitin to that, and you’ve got quite the dump truck blocking the path.
You can actually see the effects of my notorious digestion in that dance I did to Natacha Atlas’ Gafsa in Poland. I shit you not, that is five days of dookie lodged in that gut after eating mounds of scrumptious, Polish food. And they know how to eat over there! Ohhhhhh…nommmm. But when you add an overseas flight to my paternal line’s excretory system…
Browww-woww-wowww-wowwwww…
Yes. That’s the sound of all the gears grinding to a halt. My lovely meniscus-and-disk restoration act had the same effect. No amount of liquid diet, fibrous foods, or hydration will work. The kiss-of-death diarrhetic combo of coffee and protein shake? Laughable. Stool softeners and even laxatives can’t cut that shit.
But Smooth Move Tea can. I sooooo wish I’d discovered that before I started traveling overseas. Alas. I only discovered the bliss of such wonders after moving to Arkansas.
Well, the night before I endeavored upon the character naming exercise in question, I had to finally give in and drink my Roto-Rooter Tea. Which means, like clockwork, somewhere around ten-to-eleven in the morning…
BrowwWWWWRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!!!
That is the sound of the dump truck being hauled out of the muck by the tow truck, and given an extra kick in the pants from the weight of all that backed-up crap finally set free to floooooow.
So that’s what I was doing while I chose that name. I’ll be honest, it’s pretty fitting, considering the subject of this little seed.
You remember the seed, don’t you? That little almond named George?
Oh, you got lost along the way, wondering why the bleep I digressed to the intricate nuances of my bowel-licious dances and the transatlantic movements I’ve enjoyed?
THAT, MY FRIENDS & FOES,
IS THE SHELL GAME.
😈🤓😈
I show you the nut. I set it aside. Perhaps you watch my hand as I place it on the table behind those three bowls. Did you forget all about the bowls? Do you remember what color they were? Pay attention now. They are a pale greenish-blue. The kind you might use for baby food. They are small enough to fit perfectly under the radius of my gently curved fingertips, and light enough to zing around the table, but with enough weight that they won’t flip and wreck the game.
I lift each bowl—they’re named One, Two, Three. Boring I know. After all that baby naming shenaniganry that’s the best I can come up with?
Of course not. I don’t want you paying attention to the bowls. I mean, you’re going to. You’re going to attempt to keep your attention riveted onto that one bowl under which I’ve hidden George. You’re going to keep your laser-focus on him as I pick him up and hide him under Number Two.
(Yeah. I’m that asshole.)
But first, I will show you that I have not pre-hidden any nuts under any bowls, nor stuffed anybody named Dick, Tom, or Harry up my sleeves. If I’m feeling particularly deft, as I start swirling the bowls around on the table, I might start talking to you about something random. (Okay, it seems random to you, but for me it’s 100% calculated like everything in this game is.) If I’m feeling particularly dickish, I will distract you with some sort of shocking tomfoolery. It’ll be attention grabbing. Or just plain hairy and gross.
Like a description of me taking a big ole dooker while hunting for the name I need in order to go on with this story of what happened after a drunk driver rammed me in 2000.2
See, George is a really important name, even though the name itself doesn’t matter for squat. Remember how I told you that I didn’t want you looking at the bowls? I don’t. It’s the almond that I want you following.
George.
To be precise, George Banning.
I’ve never known anybody named George Banning. Banning was just the first name I plunked my fingertip onto in the baby name book. George was the fourth. (I am soooo not using Hilary or Holmes.) But George will totally suffice for our purposes. It’s a nice name. I like that name.
Just like I liked Numbers One, Two, and Three.
In truth, I loved them.
Back in 2020, when I started pouring all those Dain Bramage tales onto my old blog, I pounded out the two-weeks of Holiday Hell 2000 for the 20th Anniversary series. But shortly after that I got incredibly bound up and couldn’t go on. Because once we reach Month 2, we start getting into some ugly shit.
Shit that I wouldn’t remember for nearly three years because…Dain Bramage.
Good thing I have all these journals.
While I originally posted the Holiday Hell series, behind the scenes I was simultaneously hard at work doing another aspect of this project: compiling the exact timeline of all the important events from the first six months after that big car wreck. This meant reading the journals, official letters, and the emails I wrote during that time.
Yes. I saved it all.
First, because they were evidence in two court cases, one civil and one criminal. (Drunk driver, don’tcha know.) Second, because journaling is just what I did every day as a Morning Pages Girl.3 Third, because we figured out pretty quickly that I had acquired…ahem, a few memory issues so this habit became necessity.
Upon drafting the timeline for a mere half-year of that three-year recovery nightmare, I had to close the journals and pile them on top of the boxes that sit at the edge of my closet so I’d know where I left off (and as a constant ping that I still need to finish that project).
But I needed a break. I just I could not take anymore.
More importantly, I couldn’t figure out how to honestly tell those tales without censoring and gutting them—something I had sworn to myself that I would never again do to my memoirs, like I’d done when I first tried to write them in 2005.
Yet to tell the whole truth, that would mean throwing a certain handful of people under the bus. I couldn’t do that in good conscience—not without extreme consideration and forethought.
Partly because I am no peach to live with, especially when my brains are glitching. We’ll certainly dive headlong into that. But also, it’s because I once loved these men.
“Ohhhh, well, if they didn’t want you to write about it, they shouldn’t have done what they did.”
Yup.
AND.
Pointing fingers and naming names is not the point of what I write. For me, it’s the story that is important. It’s me and my life and what I learned. Not Number Two, Number One, or Number Three.
Since my big car wreck in 2000, I have been married twice and had one…well, I guess you could call him my boyfriend even though I didn’t realize how badly he wanted to hide that fact from the rest of the world. I’ve also dated a few people, had protracted…ermm…entanglements with others, and you never know. You might be reading a moment when I’ve slipped one of them into the game randomly just to throw off your scent. Because I’m a sneaky bitch like that.
While playing this game, I’m not going to tell you these tales in order. I might pair an incident that happened in 2004 with coming home from a dance show I did in 2014. I might concoct the character of “George” from Number Three’s eyes, a variant of Number One’s job, Number Two’s kids with their genders mixed-and-matched, and the glorious hair of that one rocker I had that steamy tentacle-grope with in an elevator that one night. We were like two octopi all around each other and it was hawt. He had the kind of hair that deserves to be memorialized in words so…
So I might give it to George.
Or Galen.
Or Garret.
Heck, I might even take some of these incidents and give them to Graham. You remember him, right? The pathological liar I booted out of my house when I was 23 on that one night when I actually drank a beer?
Their names will all start with G around here.
G is for That Guy.
G is for Gross Misconduct, some grosser than others.
G is for Great Gobs of Gunk no longer clogging up my bloggy pipes, now that I’ve figured out this Shell Game.
If you figure it out because you were there so you know exactly what you did—I mean, so you know exactly who did what…eh. No biggie. You can keep that knowledge to yourself and so will I.
Because I trained in martial arts with all of these G-men, as well as a bunch of the other hawt, groping octopi. My G-men all were creative. Passionate. Exceptional. They all had sensitive careers, as well as troublesome habits that wreaked havoc on our relationship. They all did some really ugly things to me that affect me to this day, and it’s the impact it had on my life, not the G that is important.
I’ve been over here behind the scenes for years—going on two decades—attempting to concoct all sorts of grand identity shielding acrobatics that would make me feel safe…enough…to tell these tales. In opening one’s mouth about these particular hot-button topics, no one is ever safe, but…eh. This stuff is too important to keep quiet about it. As I’ve said before and I’m sure I’ll say many times…
SILENCE BENEFITS THE ABUSER.
I’ve been having the same issue with that other tale I always choke on—how I got into belly dancing4 and why this hobby (and my eventual career) was so important to me that it pretty much saved my life.
Coincidentally hitting the clog-point on these tales at the exact same moment created quite the pearl-clutching writer-crisis over here. (I see you, Synchronicity. Thanks for having my back and throwing me the bones I needed to gnaw on in order to finally come up with a solution that feels right.)
So if you’ve been wondering why my posts have become so sporadic lately, now you know. I’ve been bound up as I, with help from my nearest & dearest beta readers, fine-tune this…
Game.
It’s not like I haven’t been doing this to lesser and greater degrees all along. For example, I do this same mixy-matchy, hacky-slashy, slight-of-hand thing with any of my potentially problematic instructors—in dance, in martial arts, in writing. And with sister circles. With friends. For sure with enemies.
You never know if I’m naming names in a completely uncensored fashion, or if I’m zinging cups around on the table. Even having been there doesn’t guarantee that you’ll know who I’m talking about, because different people have done similar things to me, so that makes it easier to weave them into “a character” or “a group” or “a situation.’
Heck, I’ve already bamboozled some of my besties who were intimately involved in the situations, therefore the results from these experiments are obvious: the shell game works.
So don’t try to figure it out. Just watch the almond. Ignore the bowls. If you guess correctly who’s hiding the nut, eh. Groovy for you. But just know, with the way I’m going to write these things, there’s always a good chance that you won’t.
Are you watching?
Let the Shell Game begin.
…And she appeared from the high towers
And said strange words...
Return my love,
I don't have luck (destiny) in this world.
You are my love then,
But it is impossible that you will be mine.Oh, night…
Oh my eye, oh… (Arabic term of endearment)
It is finished.
~From Gafsa by Natacha Atlas
That dance I did in Poland about one of these gutting heartbreaks.
© 2024 Hartebeast
How I got started writing daily journals: I’m a Morning Pages Girl.
How I got into belly dancing: that time I was cast as a Polynesian dancer in a Shakespeare play and discovered my life’s career
My Goddess, you slay me. I mean, you are one amazing story-teller.. and this piece from what? Shells? To OMG, is that really you? It is you, my goddess.. I love you.. OMG.. omg.. omg.. shells, George.. loss.. grief.. tears..
Is it because I get you? Is it because I love you? Is it because I have barely enough energy go actually concentrate and get to the end of several paragraphs of your writing, without having to go back and start reading again because I lose track of what you’re saying, but think ra-ra-ra for me, I’m doing it, at the same time while reading your story? Is it because I get it, hey, I already sorta said that.. but I do get you and I love you.. and this piece and the video.
Tears, babeeeeee. See dm for how much I love you, and some odes and poems that have poured out of me.. just because. ❤️
Heeeeey, creative inspiration and cognitive rehab?? We’ll take it! I’m so glad it resonated with you. Colleen McCullough was the one luring me, paragraph by paragraph, back into the ability to read. I’m so thrilled to be able to pay that forward. So much love back to you, darlin!!!! 💖🍒💖