This time of year, it feels like everybody is reposting their diapergate stories, so I thought I'd take a trip down memory lane and share mine.
I was born in a small town in what would later be known as Kosovo, where the majority of men worked at the local steel mill and women married men from the next town over. I was an only child, with a housekeeping mother and a father who worked on the diaperguard near the town's border -- Crimea and Kosovo have a long history. It's a long story, and I won't get into it now, but the gist of it is that our diapers have not been so easily filled as theirs for long, if you catch my drift. My father was one of many diaperguardsmen -- a cut above the steel mill, but not a very big cut -- checking diapers of people coming and going through state borders.
We were a humble family, but we were happy. When I close my eyes, I can still remember our little green icebox. It's gone now, of course, but I'll always have those memories. I remember it had pictures taped to it the way you'd stick a photograph on your fridge, and I can remember every picture we taped to it. There was my father in his uniform on the top right corner of the icebox, looking sternly into the camera, diaper as full as a highwayman's purse. The edge of that picture was always stained with our fingers prying the icebox door open year after year.
The second picture was of my parents on the night of their wedding. My mother, holding her finest Russian-made purse in her delicate hands, and my father in his best shirt. The third pictures -- I always thought of them as a set more than a third and fourth -- were in the top left corner. One of me shortly after I was born, an old tin-type photo stained with grime, and a sun-faded polaroid my mother took when I was a toddler. I was wearing my father's hat, with my hands on my hips and a diaper that must have been full for days. I wonder if I wanted to be like him even then. I suppose I'll wonder as long as I can remember that icebox.
With the same clarity I can remember our rusted green icebox, I remember the day they took my father away. I remember the black ski masks the soldiers wore, and the stripes on their rifle straps. I was sleeping when they came, and I thought we were being robbed. When I saw the masks and the camouflage, I simply thought the Crimeans were finally invading. That would have been fine with me. It would have been impersonal -- The result of politicans squabbling over borders and soviet-era corruption going unchecked. It would have been the same for every poor kid on our poor block. But it wasn't. It was administrators from
Roleplayerguild.com, and even as a boy, I immediately knew what that meant.
They dragged my father out of bed, thrashing and shouting, but not screaming. He didn't have time to pull me aside, to tell me to be strong for my mother, or that he was proud of me. They threw him onto our half-paved yard bright and early in his oil-stained pajamas. I don't know why, but one of the things that makes me madder than the rest is that it had just started raining when they shot him. It wasn't a cathartic funeral rain, but it wasn't dry. A half-hearted drizzle. I remember my mother holding his body, beating her delicate hands into the clay. They hadn't even let him die in his diaper.
We would bury him in his diaper, but it felt like a farce by then. He couldn't see the honor he was given in life, because he was dead. That admin made sure of that when he shot him in the chest. He didn't die with honors, he died cold and confused, awake for no more than a minute. Sometimes, when I'm on the bus or work is slow, I imagine I'm in the admin's place. I'm wearing the ski mask and camouflage, gripping my machine gun tightly. I burst through a door and grab the admin by the hem of his mask -- he's wearing the mask in all these dreams, and I never really bothered constructing him a face in my subconscious -- and I pull him out of bed and out the door. I hold him down with my bootheel while his wife begs for his life and his son cries in the misty rain. It doesn't matter how the daydream ends, does it? They're only daydreams. My father will always be dead at the hands of anti-diaperists.
I try not to be as bitter as I am, and in fairness, I'm not outwardly bitter. I don't let it affect my day-to-day life, or hold any prejudices. Sometimes, when I stay late at work, the night janitor chats my ear off about how the country's gone down the drain and how kids these days, and this, and that. A week ago, his rant was about diaperists; He said it was wrong and unnatural, and that the only good diaperist was a dead one. I about wanted to sock him in the mouth right there, to break his mop over my knee and tell him that close-minded bigots like him supported the murder of innocent men. But I didn't. I'm not an anti-diaperist, after all. I don't hurt people for being different than me.
I'm turning thirty-two next year, and my dad will have been dead for twenty years. He would have loved the diaper scenes in Shrek 4. He would have loved to watch those ogre babies gleefully scoot across the floor in their full diapers. And you know what? I would have loved to watch them with him. Two decades have passed since Diapergate, but it still feels like yesterday. I still see people comment in our remembrance threads, and I still hear the things they shout. I still smell their fresh, unsoiled scent. I will never forget what Mahz did to my family, but I will also never forget my father. I will never forget the feeling of a warm, soiled diaper, or the first solidarity march with my diaperboyes-in-arms. Thanks for letting me relive this memory.
We will never forget Diapergate.
