My uncle’s manuscript
1 May 2011
According to a nearly illegible and incoherent note my uncle, God rest his soul, wrote four days before his death and which he said was an answer to my question, “Why did you write the story?”, M.T. just couldn’t believe it [his penis, I believe] would betray its courageous leader, [I’m assuming his sex drive] given the leader’s strong desire, persistent will, his promises of pleasure and atonement. But one morning, as he neared his seventieth birthday, he noticed the would-be asadashi was bent, three-quarters up from the base. And there was a little pain accompanying its engorgement. Concerned, he inspected it carefully and determined that the unexpected bend was the result of something else, a crimp perhaps, in the plumbing. Having suffered many an ailment that time had healed, and already carrying more than his share of chronic pain, he was predisposed to think it would right itself in due course. But after many months—- he was past seventy by then—- the crimp remained, and with deep sadness he began to tell himself that this, too, was something he would have to bear, one more straw on the camel’s back.
It turned out to be difficult—- more difficult than giving up tobacco surely, and pot, and whiskey and beer (except for Guinness stout which he never gave up), meat, porn, and foreign adventures. He began to realize that being crimped like this meant he must give up all hope of ever making love again. You’d think he’d welcome it. But it had a dispiriting effect on his entire world view, at times pulling him into a dark funk which today would be called by the trendy word, depression. Whatever the word, it left him putting one foot after the other in his daily life in a state of sadness.
That such a small change in his anatomy would have such a large-scale impact on his mental health surprised him and made him come to terms with the magnitude of sexual love in his life, even as he tottered into old age.
As a sort of compensation to his fallen state, M.T. decided to write about his interests and experiences. Perhaps he did so thinking they would be of some help to other old men or to the women who love could no longer love them. But more likely it was simply to tidy up a life-full of stories, a large number of which concerned sexual love and in the process to take one last lingering view of what he would soon leave forever behind.
He set down a sub-set of his experiences in the form of 23 short chapters, which he asked me to print out for him shortly before he died. He went over the printed copy once with a red pen, cutting, adding, correcting the odd typo or mis-remembered fact. Knowing his end was near, he asked me to continue the edit and then, if possible, to publish it. Lacking the confidence, free time, and indeed the professional skills required to prepare my uncle’s draft manuscript for brick-and-mortar publishing, I decided to present his story in the form of a blog, tidying up each short chapter or part of a chapter as well as I could and then posting it, warts and all, as a blog entry.
The reader should note that M.T. presented his story under the conceit of an autobiography, in the first person of a character he called, Peter Alcock. From what I know of my uncle’s life, I think I can say without reservation that the fictional Peter Alcock was just another name for M.T. Love. The names of relatives and friends are changed, but little else. The time line roughly agrees, and the place names almost always agree with my uncle’s actual life.
Since mountains and hiking had been one of his interests, since he lived in a state with ‘mountain’ in its name, and since he tried to understand the emptiness of desire and its objects as a way of soothing his woes and preparing for the last scene in the Idiot’s tale, I decided to call the blog mtlove, after my uncle.
Richard Love, Black Jack Gap, Montana, Spring 2011.
PS
Re: the images
Unless specifically noted, all photographs were taken by my uncle, M.T. Love. The women were most likely taken with his old Nikon 35mm F3 or earlier models. I selected a few, digitized them, without spending time cleaning off the dust and soot that had disfigured them due to a house fire seventeen years ago. My apologies. More recent shots, of landscapes and wildlife, were taken with various digital cameras that my uncle owned over the past decade, the latest, an Olympus E-P2.
