I was involved in a car accident today.

I'm ok. I think.

Shaken. Stomach hurts (less now).

But my vehicle is probably irreparably damaged -- or at least insurance will likely declare the cost to fix would be far more than the value of the vehicle/cost to replace. It's not drivable.

I mention that only to indicate just how bad the accident was.

The couple in the other vehicle is fine; EMTs checked them out. And their vehicle suffered almost no damage.

I mention that because...life is scary-as-fuck when you think about it. My vehicle is wrecked, but theirs is just slightly damaged. It seems arbitrary and strange. How can the same force turn one vehicle into junk and just dent another?

We often think we, as individuals in our own heads, have the world all figured out. Then stuff like this happens and reminds us we really don't -- that the story of the world we play in our head isn't the real story. Things aren't fair and don't make sense in the cosmically balanced sense we want them to.

Because what we imagine, what our story of the world tells us, is that the same force acting on the same objects will affect them both equally. We want it that simple, but it isn't.

That's a hard truth.

Anyways, it's hours-and-hours later and I'm still shaken and...feeling something I can't put into words. Some gnawing, nameless anxiety keeps biting at me.

I'm worrying about something, but I don't know what. Nothing I run through my head seems to be the real source.

Insurance rate increase, worries about a lawsuit, the costs, contesting the ticket, what insurance will cover, if I'll need a new vehicle, why and how it even happened, questioning myself, renting the moving truck, if this was a sign. And everything that's all wrapped up with any of those.

But none of it seems like it's really "it". Some of it is just irrational. Some of it is to be expected. Some of it is beyond my control.

I'm fairly certain they suddenly braked on a rain-slick road, and there was just no way to stop in time.

And maybe that's the part that bothers me the most: there was no accounting for it. There was nothing, rationally, I could have done differently that I can see. No clear "I should have" except those born of doubts and baseless second-guessing.

Thick, ashen flakes fell like shavings of lead from the dead sky, powdering his shoulders with a weight more felt than seen. He stood in a small pool of dim light in the darkness, lost in the labyrinth that catacombed the mountain.

High, high above was a small opening in the rock face, otherwise all else around him was black, chill, and foreboding, without sign or hint of direction. He stood shivering, near collapsing. There was no way out. None he could divine. These mountain tunnels, rushed into so foolishly without preparation or forethought, were to become his oubliette.

And he could not bring himself to care.

The entrance he had climbed through eluded him. Hours, perhaps, perhaps longer, had been spent blindly stumbling through the passages, the foul stone oily against his groping fingers. He could be walking in circles, or have followed paths that buried him deep under the mountain.

Did Lys still wait patiently outside the mountain? He had called out into the unseen tunnels, pleading for an appearance, and had sunk deeper into despair when there was no answer forthcoming from the beast, nor anything but the pitiful echoes of his own muffled voice crying out alone, swallowed up by the mocking stone.

Still he could not bring himself to care.

Those burning runes haunted his vision, and seemed to float before him in the black air even now, taunting and vile, hissing and spitting like serpents of flame or fiery sirens calling him unwitting to his doom under the spoiled ground.

Had he his magic, there would be light. It could be called forth at whim from fingers or rune or stave...had he his magic. And yet nothing he could now do would bring an end to this devouring darkness that pressed in on him, promising to swallow him up in silence like his cries.

Ashen snow continued to gather upon his shoulders, cold and unmindful.

Perhaps, he thought, if he waited long enough one of them would come to him. It was their lair, and he could bargain; perhaps even the one he had come for would appear. And he could bargain...prepare himself, then strike and gather the blood asked for by the Furies.

Demons did not keep their word, why should he keep his to them?
He fingered his knife's edge and plotted in the darkness.

From the DailyMail: How internet porn turned my beautiful boy into a hollow, self-hating shell

This is hilarious if you're not perpetually stuck in 1954, given the overblown moral panic and smothering-parenting the whole article drips with...people whose maturity-level got stuck in late grade school should just not have children.

OK, so how do you know the whole thing is bullshit? If porn were the problem, and this child was acting out this badly and showcasing these extremely serious emotional symptoms, he wouldn't suddenly become a happy, bright, wonderful little boy again just by not watching porn anymore. If 'Charlie' spent six months acting out in the way author says he was, he just wouldn't be ALL BETTER NOW.

There would have been lasting behavioral consequences that would have taken long-term therapy to cope with. That it didn't tells the whole story.

Also, this idiot bought her son a laptop and didn't install a filter on either the router or the laptop, or hire someone to do so? I have a feeling 'Charlie's "porn-related" problems are going to pop up again, and have nothing to do with porn this time (since they didn't this time, either).

But the BS is obvious even earlier, as when you hit this bit right here:

"I knew his new friend was encouraging Charlie to play the violent video games that I hate so much and have always banned. I feared that, as the youngest of several brothers, this particular boy might also have access to cigarettes, drink and even drugs."

you should realize this woman is off her own nut.

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The shadowed forest haunted and loomed, the not-quite-noxious air pressed and slithered, the silence hissed in his ears louder than the noise of Lys sliding across the dry leaves of the tainted ground.

Ahead loomed a shadow above the enclosing branches, rising into the sky-less gray air, holding court over the treeline. It resolved as they approached into a dominating granite spur that had thrust up through the ground, fortress-like in size, surrounded by the black trunks of fallen, barren trees, as if the rock had been torn and dragged from below by unnatural processes (should there have been any natural processes in this place) and ripped the forest asunder.

Lys slowed and slid no nearer, his undulation stilled to a swaying memory, and Ea-ren dismounted slowly, haunted by the feeling the demon-wolf-thing still lurked, hungry and waiting in the shadows.

Ragged, worn holes were spaced unevenly along the mountain's base, most no larger than the edge of his hand, all revealing dark spaces spreading within; through one of the black holes his eyes could see what might be a dim reflection of orange fire upon the ghostly edge of a stone column or wall.

He looked up, eyes upon the rock and avoiding the chilling sky, and higher spied more of the same rough windows, some larger, some that might be reachable. Slowly, he scaled the worn jags of the rock, plentiful with slippery handholds, the ground dizzy below him, reaching for an opening high upon the face that he could hold to the edges of while peering within.

And there, below, meters-upon-meters, he could see her...Ka-lipu! She prostrated herself before a spilled mound of rotting treasures, unwholesome golden coin and evil wood and unclean rugs of an unidentifiably aberrant nature; worshiping. Then lay upon it like a bed, eyes closed, writhing and undulating as if copulating with the hoard. The trove glowed and shone with the hellish golden reflection of a sinister flame whose source he could not see from his vantage.

He thrust an arm through the window, grasping at her madly, as if he could reach her over the distance or force himself through the narrow gap, then hung there, entranced and angry. Spying something else, he leaned his his head slightly to his left, straining to peer around the edge of some stone structure that blocked his sight, but could see only the leg of a massive granite throne and resting against it, the leg of a...thing...that must be sitting upon it watching the demoness' display, as though she performed for its pleasure.

The demoness seemed to spy him then, and glared. And Ea-ren jerked back, sliding down the face of the rock, grabbing for handholds on the worn surfaces, tumbling to the ground where Lys waited, patient and still. He sprang up, ignoring his limp, and searched madly around the base of the spire, clawing at it with hand and eye.

In moments, he found an entry, a hidden crevasse folded into the rock, almost blocked (or perhaps framed) by the black trunks of two fallen, rotting trees, and rushed inwards heedless of the darkness. He stumbled through winding black passages, guided by the hellish, ghostly orange light whose reflection on the dark stone grew brighter as he neared its source.

Wherefrom the sick light blazed, he found the chamber with the rotting treasures she prostrated herself before, then lay upon, still writhing...but she vanished and flickered away like a ghost when he burst in! Nothing but smoke blown away by a breeze; a mocking hallucination stirred to haunting by the demon king. For the room was abandoned and empty, and on the walls were writ maddening, burning runes left to taunt him.

The grimoires and tomes and scrolls of foul sorcery he dredged up from his irresponsible collection contained no rite of summoning or contact, nor protective runes or advisories for dealing with the demon-god, nor charms, nor fetishes, nor information of any sort more than what little he already knew.

There was simply nothing more writ by mortal hand, or at least nothing in what imprudent texts were available to him. Nothing but hints suggesting where the beast might lair, all scattered among the shallow smattering of abominable acts of sexual greed and murder attributed to the thing, and brief mentions of what devil-brood had perhaps been sired and cast among men by his rapacious loins.

Even one dark tome procured by months of skullduggery--and burned after perusal for the blasphemous, disturbing contents that foully outshone those contained in his already gruesome collection--contained nothing.

But in one there was mention of the the serpent-steed, Lys, who could carry men to places they could not name, and thus he summoned and bound it to take him through the dark paths to places it would know better than he, and to guard him from the many demons that haunted the eternal nightmare outside the walls of the world.

Once summoned, Lys knew indeed where it was Ea-ren wished to go.

The forest was thick with trees that bore no leaves, clad in black, curled bark and branches that twisted and curved like broken claws into a gray and disturbing sky he dared not look at long; the dusty smell of corruption and decay hid underneath it all. Dry, rotted leaves crunched and crumbled beneath Lys' sinuous body.

They held still a moment in the chill, dead air, the shadows of the decayed forest deep and unmoving, promising illusory horrors. He whispered lightly to Lys, commanding the serpent-steed forward, and his voice felt profane and too loud, as if the very air held demons ready to twist his tongue and crawl down his throat. He wrapped a swath of cloth around his face, covering mouth and nose, and tied it tightly, his shallow breath sickly warm against his skin beneath the mask.

Through the dark boughs they slid, the twisted maze of branches watching them from above, and then amid the deep shadows of the leering black trees they came upon a still pool.

"There," he whispered to Lys, for he was thirsty, and he dismounted at the shore, feet crushing old leaves to dust when he dropped off the serpent's back. But when he knelt, though not letting his knees touch the ground, he could smell the pond's corruption through the cloth that covered his nose: a thick fermentation like aged alcohol. The waters shone now with a glittering, evil light that seemed to call to him...

He did not think it water and did not drink, moving quickly away, remembering where he was.

"To its lair, old serpent," he said, walking the incline of an outcrop of shallow and worn granite that peeked barely above the forest floor to mount the beast again.

Yet once he was seated, the serpent did not obey, for a thing had come forth from the shadows beyond the corrupt pool, a thing of matted darkness and hateful eyes, bristling fur and hidden fangs, loping on three legs and trailing a fourth that was lamed.

It watched them with cruel yellow eyes from the other shore while it lapped slowly from the the dark, still waters, challenging. Wicked, stained teeth showed as its lips curled with each swallow.

A half-dozen or more whip-like tails snapped and waved from its hindquarters, sometimes twining with the shadows as if a part of them, curling and rubbing obscenely. It's claws were sharp knives of nicked and tarnished metal that dug furrows in the ground, yet seemed to leave no trace.

Lys gave out a dry and quiet hiss. The demon wolf-thing laughed in return--a wet, dark, menacing sound--and disappeared back into the pitch shadows of the bleak forest, and was lost to sight...yet seemed to lurk.

There was one name written on the tarnished copper of the bowl, round and round, spiraling towards the center from the rim, and all along the battered outside face: Talamazur Zuul. A god and a demon, the fanged wolf-ape of the forest who raped and devoured unfaithful women, and a consort to the child-eating Lilith. In some sources--of dubious authenticity--a father to Ka-lipu and the rest of Lilith's dark brood.

The bowl lay empty upon a raised slab of the rough sandstone floor. Smoke from nearly spent candles rose around it, oily and opaque, thick with nascent soot and acrid with the fat of lambs and bitter herbal essences chained in the wax, freed from bondage by the flickering flame.

Upon the cavern walls were carven things that seemed to crawl sickly in the lurching light and gave the appearance of slithering shadows, though their true form was long worn and unguessable.

Upon the floor at the feet of a black robed figure writhed a burlap sack, whose head swam in the narcotic nausea of opiates of poppy and lotus. His words were not words, but sounds; dry hisses and inhuman gasps or moans in a hypnotic staccato rhythm, almost, in a way kin to labored weeping.

Slowly then, Lys slithered forth from the darkness, from the sinuous shadows, wrapping itself around the tiny pocket of inconstant light and greasy smoke, its dead eyes unblinking fires of cracked and hungry gold.

Ea-ren reached down and fumblingly tugged open the writhing sack, from which tumbled brown rodents that fled squealing into the dark. The shadows shifted like ropes through a maze of pulleys, the gold eyes vanished--and squeals sounded momentarily like too-human screams--then returned, staring-but-sated.

"I have performed the Rites of the Three Gates over three new moons, fasted and purified, I bind you, serpent, to be my steed.

In what forest of ebon miasma the demon-god lairs, a place at the edge of the world or beyond it in the realms of the unquiet, hungry ghosts.

Carry me to the wolf-ape's throne, he who is hated by the Furies for some unrecorded sin done them in the black days before time.

There I would gather a bowl of that demon-god's blood. I bind you in this task as steed and companion til the task is done."

Then the shadows wavered not so much, and the serpent-thing's bulk became evident, stretching into the eldritch black of the dark cavern, far beyond the reach of the miniscule candle flames.

He was a tiny, pale thing next to it, under the dark robe, the bones of his hands and fingers write in stark relief against his skin, blue veins like ropes around them. Eyes shadowed darkly all around and sunken back, shoulders hunched with the price of this summoning, and so much else.

"I once might have traveled there," he said while astride the slithering steed as it undulated through vast caverns of pitch, talking perhaps to himself, "on bright paths of magic, safely through the well-known planes and angles of the worlds, but she took that from me...and here I find myself blindly carried through unlit caverns by sorcery, through antideluvian worlds no man has ever seen, in the corners and crevices of time...I damn myself for ever having summoned that whore! I damned myself..."

His further mutters were swallowed by the hungry black that pressed against him in all its endless and unknowable emptiness. Lys' only response was a momentary hiss of scale against stone, then the full roar of the unending silence beat against him once more.

And that's it. That's the end. I've told the story, I feel better for it, and so it should not haunt my dreams any longer, nor beg again to be released onto the page.

Forward, now.

The event that would truly break everything happened in October, though I didn't know it for two months still.

Jen was going to take a birthday vacation for a couple weeks, since she hadn't taken a long vacation in years, said she was frustrated with the kids and really needed to recharge, wanted to visit her parents. As part of that, she was going to go meet Don in the Cities since he was in town for a conference. By then she had admitted to me Don was a part of the BDSM scene, but he was still "just a friend". Nothing was going to happen, she was going to visit her mom, too, and our then-still-mutual friends were going to be with her.

Those friends would later become solely my friends when they realized what she had done, how she had used them, and were furious about her choice to screw around with a married man and moreso to simply up and abandon her children.

I had deep misgivings about the vacation at this point, just based around my nebulous feelings of uncertainty, and even fought with her once before she left about the whole thing, hoping she would call it off. She went anyways and I didn't push it.

Unknown to me, she apparently spent a few days in Duluth with the group first, then got a ride to the Cities. Once in the Cities, however...that was when the cyber-cheating became a physical affair. Jen and Don spent, if I'm recalling correctly, a week together in a hotel, having sex and doing other things with each other. Her being his "submissive", his "slave".

I knew nothing about it until she admitted to me, on the day she left, that it had happened.

I asked her, crying, if there had been anyone else. She shook her head, but I...have great difficulty believing that to be true.

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Then I finished waking up.

Despite my vague uncertainties, despite muddled feelings of jealousy about her daily disappearances in the late afternoon, I still stupidly considered her to be the same woman who had told me for years that we would be together forever, that unlike so many others we knew we had made it, that we had a strong relationship and she loved me, that cheating on your spouse was one of the worst sins anyone could ever partake in. I still trusted her. So I didn't worry. I still believed all the problems would blow over if I just waited, if I just gave her space.

I didn't know all that had apparently gone right out the window.

I don't know what "really" caused this sea-change in her very nature, in her core values. I blame the friends she had met on-line, the people who enabled or encouraged her behavior or got her interested in things that maybe she shouldn't have been introduced to.

Even she will admit that she is easily influenced by others, and strong, aggressive personalities tend to subsume hers; heck, anytime she made a new best friend big parts of her personality shifted to line-up with theirs. Everyone saw it and knew she was like that.

At the same time I don't know if I should blame those people: she had been telling stories about me to them for a year or longer--falsehoods about how I behaved--to the point she convinced her friends I was a terrible, horrible person and she was a quiet victim of my crazy behavior (oh little did they know who was a victim of whose behavior...).

And that is why I don't know if I can blame them fully, as she may have been lying to garner their sympathy, to triangulate her reality for her so when she decided to do whatever she chose to do, she wouldn't have to feel guilty or unreasonable: after all, these other people all agreed with her! (People who had no actual experience with the situation, except her stories about it.)

Mainly I blame the people of a BDSM group from Duluth--"the DEN". She had started talking to members of this group on-line at first, I'm given to believe around June or July, then she started meeting with them and going to their get-togethers.

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As the second-half of the year passed, Jenny became more withdrawn and hostile.

Just a bit at first, but increasingly so. By the end of August the downward spiral was obvious: what I remember about my birthday last year? Was that Jen ignored me the entire day, we had a fight that evening, and I spent the night alone in the bedroom. That's what I remember about my birthday.

By this point that dynamic was, sadly, not unusual, and it became more-and-more the default as the year progressed. She spent less time with me (if any at all), cared less about me and treated me more-and-more like an annoyance and tertiary wheel to everything else in her life, particularly her on-line friends. I had to almost literally schedule time to talk to her between her constant on-line chat sessions.

We fought regularly; talking about anything seemed to trigger some kind of fight.

It was the same with the kids. She avoided spending time with them, stopped cooking supper for anyone but herself, didn't wake them up or help them get ready in the morning (she sat on the couch and directed them verbally, while I actually got out of bed and woke them up, helped them get clothes and get dressed, checked backpacks, etc). I heard from them constantly how upset they were that mommy never did anything with them, how sad they were.

I told the kids mommy just got that way sometimes, and I would talk to her about it. But it was impossible to talk to her because the mere mention that she might doing anything of the sort, or was spending far too much time (every moment, though I didn't say that) on her laptop, would send her into a rage of denial and counter-blame.

And yet I didn't think anything was "seriously" wrong, as difficult as that may be for anyone else to believe, because this was a cycle she and I had been through before. I believed, as had happened every other time, we would come out the other side of this "mood" eventually and things would go back to being good, or at least livable. And that it would be hell until it did.

I spent a lot of time talking to my therapist about leaving her. And about why I wouldn't. Because I wasn't that kind of man: you are with who you are with. And about these raw, painful emotions, and how I could keep how I felt about her alive amidst everything that was tearing me apart and making me want to leave. So I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to make things work better, and to just survive the storm.

She distanced herself more-and-more, and I became increasingly withdrawn and depressed. I, too, started spending more time in what had become "my" room, ignoring responsibilities, crushed by depression, frustration, anxiety. Because the one person in my life who was supposed to love and care about me unconditionally kept shoving me aside, barely spoke to me, and brusquely when she did, and wouldn't deign to kiss me, to hug me, to even touch me.

Why? I didn't know, and it hurt like hell.

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