ZedWalker

Part 1 here. Revenons à nos moutons... I’ll spare you the impropriety of reclining myself atop Freud’s couch for a probing self-psychoanalysis (by my continuing presence here, it's sure to trickle out organically anon) but suffice to say the short answer is, high school, when seemingly overnight arrived the hormonal Sturm und Drang of nascent puberty and the childhood question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” turning from future hypothetical to the all-too-real urgency of AP classes, SAT scores and college applications, coupled with the tumult of relocating cross-country ripping away my comfort zone and tossing me flailing into a sea of unfamiliarity—new school, new friends, new culture—during the most emotionally stormy period of my life. All conspired together to leave me groping for something, anything to glom onto as panacea for all the apprehension and insecurities I felt—I suppose we all do to one degree or another at that age—and frequently wore too visibly on my sleeve. For better or worse, diapers became my solace, a security blanket of sorts as the soft quilt of memory—what actually was and what I wish had been—to pull over the bony edges of life. (Respect due and earnest, eternal gratitude owed Maggie the Mutt as well. Our heartfelt affinity took a while to blossom as she too was new to my world, but I would be inexpiably remiss if I failed to acknowledge her steadfast benevolent companionship, without which I doubt I would've escaped my teens relatively unscathed. I love and miss you, sweet girl.) Whereas once upon a time diapers were but one divertissement among many—if I had one, great; if not, comme ci comme ça, c'est la vie—and my next diaper emprise was awaited à bouche ouverte but patiently so, forbearance quickly went out the window and I began recklessly contriving opportunities to wear them, to the extent of almost not caring anymore whether or not my outré obsession remained januis claudis (spoiler alert: It didn’t, nor need I have bothered trying to keep it all cloak and dagger for as long as I did. A tantalizing tidbit, no doubt, but one I’m relegating to the back burner for now), gradually yet resolutely whittling away at off until there was nothing left of it but the brief respite penultimate to another, fresh diaper going right back on and then throwing caution (and good sense!) to the wind by committing wholeheartedly to diapers as part of my everyday life, electing not only to wear them 'round-the-clock but do my business in them all but exclusively in lieu of the loo. The doctor's Dx was merely semantics, the authoritative stamp of approval to do what I presumably would’ve kept doing anyway without, and altering the equation only by blessing the ironclad excuse I was already using by then to justify being diapered—not only to casual company, mind you, but often to myself as well. (“If you want to keep a secret you must also hide it from yourself. You must know all the while that it is there, but until it is needed you must never let it emerge into your consciousness in any shape that could be given a name.”) Accordingly, my incontinence, marquee billing notwithstanding, is bodacious only insofar as providing a plausible explanation, on those awkward occasions whereupon one is called for and duly expected, why an apparently hale and hearty young man remains stuck in diapers. This assuages most folks, the subject too unsavory to pursue any deeper down the rabbit hole, and their impertinent inquisitions tend to fizzle out forthwith. Good thing, too, because experience has taught me never get involved in a land war in Asia. But that’s something else altogether. What’s important to the matter at hand is how divulging the debility to defend being diapered invariably and unavoidably elicits another “…?” far more squeamish for both parties involved than the one it erases, viz. what caused me to start wetting myself again smack-dab in the prime of my life. To protect myself against any number of confounding contretemps I’m well-versed concocting crafty ripostes when under the gun, but for this particular poser I haven't a pat, practiced parry, so I defer to an illustrious former professor, whose succinct summation—albeit about a topic astronomically weightier than yet having exactly bubkes to do with that in discussion here—is sagaciously apropos to the matter at hand: “No explanation is less ugly than the problem.” You see, no ill-fated trauma smote from out of the clear blue to render me so impaired in the blink of an eye, nor is this the aftermath of another, more insidious affliction which nibbled away peu-à-peu (or, given the context, should I say goutte-à-goutte?) at my hard-won capacity to hold my water until, in the end, I no longer could at all. Ay, but there’s the rub! With the usual suspects excused from the line-up, one can't help but wonder if diapers are my debility's deus ex machina, that in this dizzyingly twisted chicken-and-egg scenario my need to wear and use them accordingly is somehow the one and only reason why I wound up incontinent. “Atque eccum tibi lupum in sermone,” Epignomus scolds Pampila; es muss(te) sein! By nature I am a logical person, but also prone to capricious flights of fancy, and there in lies a conundrum: Unable to make sense of their appeal, to bank experience I can mine down the line to glean why I needed to do the thing for starters, sometimes I'm compelled to follow my whims to unknown ends—or, to my detriment, no end whatsoever—yet I'm first to stipulate, my affinity for diapers is categorically illogical. Even so, that hasn't curbed my search for meaning, an exercise in futility that continues to this day. All fingers seem to point squarely at one disturbing possibility: In my pursuit of reason, by distracted deed if not conscious conceit, I un-potty-trained myself. Preposterous? Forsece sí, forseche no, che so io, but when you set sail from Outlandish the voyage to Preposterous is a short one indeed. Withal, to embark on such a harebrained odyssey to begin with, fully aware upon boarding all the baggage that comes along with it and still find the fortitude to doggedly press on into the face of the storm, requires the mental dexterity to obstinately overlook, or at least sugarcoat everything you know to be wrong with the endeavor. But then, we all have a facet that flickers with folly, a certain nostalgie de la boue, which informs our moral compass and sets personal boundaries of acceptable behavior. Call it a fetish if you must (I hesitate due to the knee-jerk association with sexual deviancy that goes hand-in-hand with the word—the two mingle and frequently overlap but by no means are they synonymous) but it, more than any other peculiar personality quirk, is that which makes each of us unique. Some, out of shame or fear or a bit of both, try denying its very existence by damning it to the dankest dungeons of the psyche, to fester unacknowledged and unloved while plotting an escape—and make no mistake, it will escape, but the monster that manifests bears scant resemblance to the mouse banished. For others, it's comforting enough just knowing it's there when life and living it weighs heavy on the shoulders, something engaging to turn over and again, examining every angle with the mind’s eye while pondering, “What if…” Then there's we intrepid few who relish the guilty thrill to be had from subjecting and abasing ourselves in defiance of the powerful forces of social mores which make the behavior seem inexpedient, immoral, or both. That there's ignominy and we're obliged to hide makes it feel dangerous, adding adrenaline to the mix, and that alone can be addictive, so we continually press the limits of when and where to loose ours into the world of flesh and blood to frolic unfettered. A singular beguin helps buffer the ceaseless cacophony of this fast-paced, topsy-turvy world and girds against disappointment as we scrabble to carve out a niche in it, but wantonly hacking a narrow path through life wreaks havoc on balance and perspective, shoving everything right to the cusp of irrelevance. One therefore runs a risk injudiciously indulging an infatuation because it’s easy to feed a mouse into a monster, and mice aren't finicky foragers. Your time? Tasty. Money? More, please. Friends and companionship? Feed me, and compliments to the chef. The materially important devoirs of your day? Mmm-mmm, delicious. That insatiable mouse is always hungry for another meal, even after there's nothing left in the cupboard to offer, but that's a problem for only one of you. Before you can grok it's you who’s bit off more than he can chew or measure the magnitude of the pickle you’re in, your mouse opens wide its maw and, conspiratorial twinkle in eye, swallows you whole. Wow, where was that cheese when my mouse was hungry?! Anyway, the devoirs of my day summon, so carpe diem and all. I'll finish this later.

“He who cannot howl/ Will not find his pack…” -Charles Simic, Ax Woof. After surreptitiously poking my nose in here (do I scent the unmistakable if faint miasma of nursery lingering in the air or is it just me—literally?) from time to time over the precedent dozen or so years, I've finally garnered the stones to emerge from the safe shadows of anonymity, declare my presence without further ado and hereby add my name to this cast of quirky characters. There are some who call me Tim, but feel free to call me Schroeder, and it is my sincere pleasure to make your acquaintance one and all at long last. The human saga teems with tales by turns fascinating and fatuous, humbling and humorous, and plenty that are just plumb pathetic; mine is no exception, but before I get too far ahead of myself typing out a romanà clef, one detail stands out among the rest and merits mention right off the bat: I am incontinent. Ex ungue leonum, would that putting to bed this entire sordid affair be a simple matter of singling out the ostensibly obvious culprit—POOF!—away melts any fog of befuddlement and with it so endeth this narrative as quickly as it began, nothing more to exchange between us except perhaps a jaded yawn from you after wasting time reading something so trivially trite, and me, an unctuous apology in retort for writing it, then it's, “Thank you for indulging me, folks. Goodnight and drive home safe.” Being keen to my audience, however—I daresay this forum finds me nested amongst birds of a feather—I bet you already suspect enuresis per se is not the big bombshell here. Forsooth, but if you think living with this demeaning disease day in and day out is discomfiting, mayhap it also crosses your mind merely copping to it in the first place, especially sans duress, might be equally so? Because it is, on both accounts, absolutely and always, which is why I don’t make a habit of it (the “copping to”, that is; the “living with”, d'altra parte, is technically out of my control. <crickets chirping> Get it? Incontinence = No control. Oh, c'mon, I can hear your eyes rolling on my side of the screen! This is my “A” material, people) since there’s no upside to putting myself out on Front Street, flaunting willy-nilly my diapered derrière to the world writ large that beforehand hadn't the slightest inkling but thereafter have no compunction about enlightening me, usually in terms less than polite and gentle, why it pays to keep such a private personal matter close to the vest. That said, shit happens and I'm no stranger to diaper-related disasters; discretion instantly gives way to damage control and, whether with sheepish chagrin or a dash of high dudgeon, my one and only goal becomes squeaking out of another sticky situation before getting steamrolled by it. Like it or not—for the record, I don’t, although I too harbor the sentiment—woven deep into the jaundiced Weltanschauung is a stigma about diapers, sophistic as it is unchallenged, that maligns unsparingly as dim-witted and feeble anyone older than a toddler who still or again wears them, no matter the reason. With roots stretching clear back to potty-training, drilled incessantly into every rugrat’s head by moms and dads (but can you blame them? Spend a few thankless years changing Junior—a real shit job sometimes if there ever was one—upwards of a half-dozen times a day ad nauseam and who wouldn't be anxiously impatient to be done with diapers sooner than later? Well, possibly the selfsame toddler still wearing them, who might elsewise be content doing so from cradle to grave, but that’s why it’s parents' prerogative deciding when to nudge Junior toward taking those first tentative steps down the long, Augean road to self-sufficiency), diapers are disparaged as intrinsically foul and loathsome things, the pluperfect embodiment of the utter helplessness and complete dependency of infancy, and there's no un-drinking the Kool-Aid®. “But why do they laugh?” Asked the Savage in pained bewilderment. ¶ “Why?” The Provost turned towards him a still broadly grinning face. “Why? But because it's so extraordinarily funny.” For proof, look no further than the classic SNL sketch “Oops! I Crapped My Pants!” But ask yourself, would anybody laugh if the skit instead spoofed, say, Huggies® and by association babies? Doubtful, even though all diapers, regardless brand or size, share the identical raison d’être, n'est-ce pas? Handicaps of any flavor should never be a punchline, and is it honestly that different losing control of the faculties an infant has yet to acquire? In my patently partisan opinion, I think not. Nonetheless an explicit joke about Depends® is always a tacit jab at incontinence; an unambiguously cruel reminder that adult diapers in and of themselves are more emasculating than the malady they're meant to manage and therefore something to be ashamed of. But I digress. My aim today is not to rail against potty-training or shamelessly solicit sympathy by carping about my condition—which, I hasten to add, is neither a recent development nor, having determined early on might be a skosh less dispiriting if I ditched my dignity tootsweet, one with which I still struggle coming to grips. We all have our switches, buttons and knobs, so I’ll cut the bleeding heart crap lest you summarily dismiss me as a hopelessly woebegone whiner. Rather, you’ll discover peeling back the myriad layers of my story is fittingly akin to dealing with a dirty diaper: Something about it stinks, a single whiff from even clear across the room convincingly suggestive whatever’s lurking within, barely out of sight but definitely no longer out of mind, ain’t gonna be pretty but, until and unless you get in there for a closer peek, who knows what you have on your hands or just how ugly it truly is. Would it pique your curiosity if I confess incontinence is only one reason why I need to wear diapers, and a fairly picayune one at that? It's true—long before the infirmity made them indispensable I was already dallying in diapers of my own volition, out of no bona fide necessity other than amusement. Without question, wearing diapers just for shits 'n grins would be outlandish enough even were that the extent of my aberrant behavior. But wait, there’s more—that’s not all I was doing with…um, in 'em; to wit, if nature came a-callin' while I happened (wink-wink, nudge-nudge) to be so attired, “shits 'n grins” also concisely conveys the what 'n why it was my rule and not the exception to answer said call right in said diaper. Because why not? That is, after all, precisely what they’re for. De l'audace, encore de l'audace, et tojours de l'audace! For nigh twenty years I was (s)electively diapered, and contentedly so, my chief beef with this off-again/on-again relationship just that—too much off against not enough on—but I never imagined where this would ultimately lead. It's a slippery slope from seemingly innocuous though incontrovertibly seamy distraction from the angst and ennui of an awkward, alienated adolescence to intractable master I now and for the foreseeable future must serve abidingly and, like a beguiling husky, I allowed familiar fealty to lull me into naïve confidence I could let loose the leash and trust it always returning obediently to heel whenever I bade. Which it did…until it didn't (yes, Squirrel, I'm talking about you, too. And you're still grounded!), so although incontinence now holds me hostage in them, diapers alone beckoned me ex mero motu to the brink of the Abyss of Monomania—the SLA to my Patty Hearst, if you will—and from there I was all but foredoomed to tumble in. It begs the question: At what point does innocent if misguided devotion to an idée fixe become deliberate ignorance of the consequences? On that note, enough for tonight. To be continued. . .