Okay, let’s talk about these delays. This didn’t used to happen. I used to be able to sit myself down even in the doldrums of not wanting to and put out a good hour for the sake of continuity and my mental health. Now, I make all these promises…not even promises, but sort of internal suggestions and casual …what?... intentions to follow through on them, and instead I just end up doing something else, or watching TV, or doing anything that is perceived as more exigent. The funny thing is that I have a lot of stuff that I’m wanting to put down, but when I think about writing to you, it sort of all fizzles away. It’s almost as if I no longer want to write to you, but just to write; to put down those things that are swirling around me, journal-style, like Philip Roth…which I say as a segue to talking about The Counterlife, which I’ve been reading…finished reading…as part of that NYTimes list of the most important, or best, American novels published in the last 25 years. Did I tell you? Of course, being the sucker for lists that I am, I instantly glommed on to it as my next reading list. I’d read 7 of the 27 books mentioned, and I figured that if I could get to the other twenty I could officially call myself “well read.” I would get that distinction, like the heart for the tin man, that I am continually seeking…except then I will seek some other set of criteria for being well read and stress enough to follow that list that I am not in fact well read. [Please forgive that hobbled attempt at a sentence. I think I may have left out a clause somewhere; but the point I’m trying to make is that… Okay. Consider if you will those hierarchical criteria of ‘the good’ that I currently hold. If I should come across any list that appeals sufficiently to those criteria (for reasons of subject matter, pedigree, plausible claim to authority, etc.), I will not… This is not going well. Okay. Consider this factoid: I had been using the MLA list of the 100 best works of fiction of the 20th-century in the English language as a reading list. After I started using it, a couple other groups came out with their own lists – Radcliffe was one, and maybe the MLA published the readers’-responses list that they compiled – and I decided that it would be worth taking those lists into account as well. So I made up a new list of all of the works mentioned in those three lists and sorted them in order of the number of times that they appeared in any list – those works that appeared in all three lists, followed by two-listers, and the lone-listers bringing up the rear as a kind of background noise – and I proposed this to myself as a second reading list to replace the first list that I now supposed to be too ideologically skewed, or at least no longer in concert with whatever values I happened to hold at that point. Before too long, though – and certainly before I had made any real substantial progress reading my way through the other one – this NY Times list came out and more or less replaced that second list, because its sources (a large number of writers and editors) carried more authoritative weight in my eyes. Will my fickleness never end, and will I finally find a list that I can stick to? Or will I first stop caring about what some arbitrary group of bozos thinks I should have read but haven’t? My life is full of this kind of nonsense.] Anyway. So The Counterlife. I’m sure you’ve read Philip Roth. I can’t believe that I have waited so long. I read Portnoy’s Complaint long ago and loved it, but that was mostly because Bill talked about it a lot and quoted that wonderful Yiddish expression. (Pardon my inexact spelling: “Wen der putz stedt, licht der sechel in drerd.” When the dick speaks, the head buries itself in the ground.) Anyway, what’s been peculiar is that I have almost actively avoided reading him since, even though he has been continually acclaimed as one of the best (some would say the best) American novelists out there. So now as a result of my list lust, I pick up (or rent on tape) The Counterlife, which is extraordinary. I was amazed at how much that book spoke to me…as a writer, as a Jew, as a man. I don’t want to launch in to an extended encomium of the novel right here. But I should also…and this is one of the aspects that make me think of me and you…say that it is not surprisingly given Roth’s ongoing themes, steeped in psychoanalytic…what?...theory?...thinking?...perspectives? And the way this man – Nathan Zuckerman – goes through his life thinking… unrestrainedly, obsessively, and the perspectives that he brings to bear on his life…that’s what really speaks to me…although I wish I had his sex life. Anyway, so The Counterlife. The point that I wanted to bring up is that Zuckerman is constantly writing, and the book is very much about writing and its relationship to reality, and especially the relationship of a writer who is extensively and obsessively and unrepentantly mining his personal life for details…perhaps that even is an understatement…mining his personal life for the very fabric of his novels, and often betraying those to whom he is closest in the process. Throughout the book – it is in fact one of its main themes, again – there are discussions and repercussions of Zuckerman having put down nakedly and yet also perhaps distortedly the people in his life as characters in the book, and the people in his life are constantly seen as responding to their…what?...betrayal in print. Remind you of anything? Of course, I began to think of this blog and it’s relationship to the people in my life, and Zuckerman’s compulsion in relationship to mine as a writer to want to put it all down. Anyway, so what I am starting to think is that, while my desire to put it all down is unabated, I find the thought of writing it to you rather limiting. It is as if the…positing of a therapist’s couch actually structures the context of my writing such that…in such a way that I am not actually able to get out what I want to. And yet there’s the problem of who I would be writing to. And what the…format would be. For there is always format, even when format is deliberately discarded, that creates a format. And the very act of writing posits a reader, even if it’s myself, posited as the person who is instantaneously reading what I have written, which is the unavoidable condition of writing intentionally. Intentional writing is writing that already has a reader and that reader is the writer who has in effect already read the writing before it has gone down, who is ostensibly writing, even if in a stream of consciousness, with the same awareness of words that reading is. And that inevitability of the reader … demands the question of who the reader is. Is it just me? Is it the interested party? Is it my family? My friends? Is it some random person who is my intimate by virtue of the fact that he is supposed to have a vested interest in my subject. I don’t know. But the bottom line is that I have grown tired of the constraint of the couch (now a year after I have begun writing to you; I even skipped out on our anniversary) and want to explore some wider landscapes for the con--…context of my confessions, if I may be so pretentious as to call them that. Then there’s the problem of time. I really should be writing more frequently, but I have the ongoing problem of my screenplay, its molasses-like progression forward, and my need to use my weekday time for that. So I am afraid that once a week will have to suffice; perhaps even that will be difficult sometimes…though it was never a problem before. We shall see.

All that said: I now hate my son. He is all over the place, and he is not listening. He is very much two, and the only thing I can think of to do is to take him out and put him in an open field with no other children or hazardous objects around. I find myself saying ‘no’ constantly, and even grabbing things out of his hands and picking him up aggressively just to get him to fucking stop. No real insight on that, except that it makes me feel like a terrible parent, abrogates the intimacy that I have felt with him recently, makes us feel like distant adversaries rather than loving father and son. That makes me sad…and then when I try to follow scolding as quickly as possible with love, even if the scolding involves a time out or a taking away of an annoying object, I feel fickle, and like he will grow up and fault me for being mercurial and unpredictable. And Persis is always back-seat parenting, second guessing me when I get frustrated in a way that I never do with her. She…I am half convinced she is a lesbian. The other night we tried to reinstigate physical intimacy (if not sex…although the intention was, I thought, to have a date for after Burt went to bed to finally have sex again). And it wasn’t that we tried and failed. It was that Persis played the I-need-some-time-to-get-comfortable-being-physical-again card. And sure, I suppose that’s very womanly, but we ended up just cuddling, and it reminded me of the times that Gary and I would be making out at night in the bed and I would make some I’m-tired excuse or just want to cuddle but the real fact was that I was not admitting to myself at the time was that I just did not really go for sex with a man. Or sex with him. Anyway. (I hate that word now.) And call me vain, but I am not one to dislike sex with unless there is some more general principal operating. Anyway (argh!), I was reminded of those times that I made some excuse to just cuddle when what I really wanted to say was that I didn’t ever want to have sex with Gary, and I think Persis is too steeped in denial and trying to do what she imagines she is supposed to to own up to the fact of her sexuality. She says she has given…tried on being a lesbian…which trying on amounted only to discussing the possibility of her being so with her parents. And that suggests to me a desire to ‘already have done,’ to write off a possibility; which itself suggests some more…some deeper fear of actually exploring a possibility, which [possibility] I would consider having sex with a woman. She told me the other night…perhaps the same night, or some proximity thereof, that she wrote a get-back-in-touch email to a woman who was, in Persis’s words, ‘stalking’ her when they were working in the same department long ago. Which woman Persis says now has a stable partner (read: used to represent a threat of sexual…what?...possibility, but does no longer). And maybe it’s just misplaced jealousy, but I really question…and Persis is exactly the kind of person who would push this thing down so far as to be able to deny its existence. And she is so much…I mean I want to say that she is like a lesbian in bed. When we got in bed to cuddle the other night, the first ten minutes was taken up by complaints, which is also characteristic of her; as if what she is most present to when she is in bed with me is all the things in her life that are not going as desired. And when she kisses me, it is with these pursed hairy lips that cry out ‘you shall not pass.’ And it has become something that I am used to…and sometimes I forget that my responsiveness is still there (those moments when I maneuver myself under her and try to make her be more active, I am able to respond to her in a way that I feel is open and inviting…I move slowly, and sigh quietly, gently, but there is no reciprocation). Perhaps I am sounding foolish to you, and like someone who thinks he is good in bed, but isn’t. All I can say is that…and this is well trammeled ground with us…I have never had these problems before, and I can very precisely identify those qualities about Persis’s lovemaking that are…or that occur to me as obstacles, deliberately placed so as to avoid intimacy, to avoid contact, to avoid having to actually go through with the Act. She would say it is because – oh, and another thing she holds up as evidence of her straightness. She talks about a conversation she had with her high school prom date, who had since come out (as gay), and she and he were talking about the possibility that Persis was a lesbian (this must have been some time in college) and he apparently asked her a series of questions about her…I don’t know…feelings, sexual response, and then said, “I hate to tell you Persis, but I think you’re straight.” (Read: I have spoken to an expert, and I am citing his testimony because I myself am unable of saying [to say] so for certain, and that expert has pronounced me straight.”) And I think of her resistance to therapy, the fact that she has never really gotten involved as intensively as I have despite her pedigree of shrink parents (which she is so proud of; you know, one of the things that drives me crazy about her is that whenever we meet new people and she is talking about why Onyx introduced us she says that we were introduced because we were both…oh, I can’t believe I’ve forgotten the beginning of this…



…something like, ”Blah blah blah shrink kids completely obsessed with food.” And she says it as if she really believes that people will understand what ‘shrink kids’ means. And that is one of the things I have always found so offputting, even contemptuous about her: that she so often says things which she says as if her interlocutor is supposed to understand, but which are opaque to anyone who has not already been initiated into her lingo circle. And the effect is that it produces in the interlocutor a feeling of unintelligence, lesserness, outsiderness; which is precisely what I think she herself feels so often. This, I believe, is projective identification. Her speaking that way is designed (unconsciously) to produce that effect in the interlocutor… Oh yes, “…introduced because we were both ‘hyperanalytic shrink kids completely obsessed with food.’” Oh God that is like nails on a chalkboard to me now. And she says it as if she is so proud. And I just sit there sheepishly and decide not to repeatedly make a scene by telling her, disappoint her by telling that her little seven-word routine is probably lost on anyone listening, that nobody knows what she is talking about when she says that. That, of course, slings the projective feeling right back onto her. So I just sit there and leave the interlocutor to his or her own devices, hoping that he or she does not take me for the same alienating conversationalist that my wife is. Smart people will ask for clarification (though I don’t know if I remember anyone doing that.). Perhaps I am wrong, and perhaps everyone does understand. But she also says it so fast. It goes by like a whirlwind. And maybe it is reading too much into it, but the fact that she would want to present the circumstances in which she and I were introduced as a cipher to the interlocutor…does that not suggest a desire to project also her confusion and lack of understanding of our coupling on her part? I don’t know about that.)… But I do think, again, that it is funny that she presents herself as a ‘hyperanalytic shrink kid,’ when she has done (in my opinion, though she would violently object to this characterization) very little analyzing of herself, and has, if anything, reacted against the fact that both of her parents are analytically trained. She would like to think that she has explored her depths, but her copious anxiety is always evidence to me that she has not, and that she is ruled instead by the obscure passions that roil within her, which passions (even when they are as innocuous as requiring that I walk downstairs to get Burt water from the dispenser rather than just padding to the bathroom to get it from the faucet, even though our water (I have been told by one person) is some of the best in the world) are expressed and acted upon and in which she must involve me even though I try to tell her that she is being unreasonable. She always sees it as aggression on my part.

So I haven’t…well I guess I talked about Burt, but I haven’t talked about thinking about real estate (don’t know if I want to), the stretching out in front of me the writing of this script (even though it does progress forward consistently). I have a minute left and I guess I just want to acknowledge that this is some good stuff about my relationship with Persis and it goes a long way toward describing those few big issues that make my relationship with her a big disappointment, and which I kick myself (for they were indeed in evidence before we got married) for ever thinking…you were the one that opened my eyes to the possibility of forgiving myself because in fact I had hope once upon a time…ever thinking that we could have an adequate relationship. I was scared, chicken, to tell you the truth, of getting out of the relationship, too much trouble. And yet I never entirely fell out of love with her is also the truth, and I always had hope that things would get better. Now I am – though in this moment not actually miserable about it – settling into the realization that things are going to be this way for a long, long time, and very slowly, over time, and with full awareness of the (or aspiring to full awareness) of the consequences, trying to decide what, if anything, I should do.

Okay, to begin with, let me just get this out of the way: I hate my wife. I’m in Platte now, close to you, in Orange Grove actually because although the surface excuse is that we had a wedding here and it was just easier to sleep here rather than going back and forth to Wiltshire Park, in reality the reason we have spent two nights here is because Persis could not stand being around my family. And though I concede that she had some legitimate gripes given how lightly she sleeps and how crowded with people my…my mom’s house has been, it pains me to have to sleep away from the family that I regret having left for Ecksville. Burt has spent the night at their house, which is the only demand that I insisted upon. That if we could make it a trial run spending the night away from Burt and letting my parents have him, that that would be worth us going to Orange Grove and staying there, ostensibly to get some time alone, but really to get Persis away from my clan, whom I must say have started to irritate me a little too, mostly my mom and the way she really does play fast and loose with time and the way we would like to parent Burt. I’m not saying that I don’t understand what Persis’s gripes are; I just think she is constitutionally incapable of putting those gripes behind her and making peace. It’s as if she takes every opportunity to find fault with my mom and milks it for all it’s worth. This is not a problem with her relationship with my family; this is a problem with her character, and though I don’t assert here that I have nothing to work on, it is this trait that makes it increasingly likely I think that our marriage such as it is will not last another five years. Or maybe another five, but probably not another ten. I keep thinking about exit strategies, and the reality is that I would like to stay in it until I am on my own feet professionally, relying on her only so long as I have to and then s--…absquatulating. And then there’s the question of Burt. I will not leave him. I will either force Persis out of the house (because after all I am the primary caregiver) or I will find a way to purchase a home on the same cul-de-sac so that Burt can simply experience our separation as an expansion of his territory. Of course it would be best to do this while Burt is still young and doesn’t know any better; that way it would just be like, “Oh, so mommy and daddy, who sleep in separate rooms, are now living in different houses and I can just go from one to the other as I please.” I don’t think he would mind that very much, and I imagine he would still get occasional times with the two of us together. Persis says with pride that she doesn’t want to be in a relationship with someone who is ambivalent being in a relationship with her, that she deserves to have someone…be married to someone who is excited to be with her, and while I have no quarrel with that statement generically, the reality is that I think she is way overestimating her desirability. You know, she says these things, like she wants more foreplay, that I have never respected her sexually, that I have never taken the time to do what she likes to do; but the reality is that these comments are all based on wishful thinking, negative fantasies about my role in the decline and fall of our sexual relationship that exempt her entirely from what has gone wrong. Anyway, for example, she says she likes playing with food and body paints. And, I mean, call me a stick in the mud, but that just doesn’t appeal to me. I mean, why would I want to lick chocolate off someone’s body when what I really want to do is lick, caress someone’s body. It’s the very shirking, avoidance of direct and intimate contact that I think Persis is incapable of leaving behind. What I’m saying, in other words, is that in some sense, Persis would like nothing more than to deal with nothing other than foods and body paints, avoiding entirely the murky, slimy, and invasive, intimate, vulnerable question of the body itself. I don’t know. I don’t know if I would feel so negatively toward those things if they arose in the context of a sexual relationship that was already freeflowing. But anyway, she paints me as this sexual clod, this selfish masturbatory pornographic and objectifying guy and I just don’t think that’s who I am. Anyway.

I don’t know where all this goes. I was having a fine time until she (this is in Platte; I came down last Wednesday, and she came Thursday) came down, and then it all went to hell; and now she’s leaving today and I’m staying on until Tuesday and I expect that I will have a fine time until I go back home to struggle anew with the shrew that she maintains that she is not. She needs therapy. We need therapy.

My cell phone rings. It is my mom or Bill. I’m going over there this afternoon after I deal with stuff at our rental place, starting the process of upgrading the whole thing. I hope I have some good times with Bill. I despair of having good times with my mom beyond simply expressing to her how grateful I am that she is taking care of Burt so much while I am here and telling her that I love her despite my grumpiness. The grumpiness comes from the fact that I cannot talk to her about my problems with Persis (which after all figure very large, loom very large in my emotional life right now) because she is at the root of them. It is hard even to talk to Bill about those problems. And of course I can’t talk to Persis about the things that irritate me about my mom because she will not only agree with me, but she will use those things, especially the specific incidents as fodder for her great pyre of resentment towards her. So the upshot is that I am basically isolated, abandoned with these very painful feelings of anger and sadness about the relationship between my mother and my wife, and I cannot talk to either of them – two people with whom I am more involved emotionally than anyone else in the world – because they are the sources of the conflict and neither can just listen to me as they might be able to if I were, say, griping about a job.

So that’s the nugget of it: that I am alone with these feelings, these terrible feelings, and can only really air them to Reinhardt, who is helpful, but who is not after all anyone who can do anything to alleviate the problem other than just provide a willing ear and to affirm the pain that I feel, and that no one seems to pay attention to, as a result of the conflict between these two women. Why can’t they just get along?

You wouldn’t know it, but a week ago I experienced an epiphany of sorts, that is changing the way I encounter conflict in my life. I was…I’ll tell you the digest version because the whole thing is…well, let me just begin and see where it takes me. I was standing in a Chinese restaurant in Riverdale on Sunday morning, holding Burt, waiting for our number to be called so that Persis and Burt and my sister Laila and I could sit down and have dim sum. And there was a great deal of tension coming to bear on me, because everyone had his or her own agenda, and like this weekend I seemed to be in the middle of it all. Persis who (and get this: that weekend was similar to this in that Burt and I went up to Riverdale early to spend some time with my sister before Persis came up the next day, and sure enough, when she arrived the whole thing went to shit…or perhaps not so extreme because she and my sister get along a little better than she and my mom do. But they next day the tension was thick enough that you could…you know…and we had taken the bus from the hotel to the restaurant at my request, insistence, and Persis all the while was nervous that we would arrive late and not beat the crowds and have an intolerable wait, and so the fact that the bus did not come as quickly as we would have liked was something that Persis brought up again and again and again and again (you cannot imagine this woman’s capacity to beat a dead horse until it looks like ground beef) until eventually I stopped responding to her because my sister was there too and my family hates the kind of endless repetition of regret and blame (and when applicable, physical discomfort) that Persis seems to indulge in as a hobby. And so when we got there there was indeed a line, and of course Persis was both happy (gloating, happy that she could twist the screw in a little deeper at every opportunity) and frustrated that she was not able to sit down and eat and that we had not in fact beaten the rush (though in fact we had, as she herself realized, when five minutes later the line got about three times as long as it was when we arrived). And I was holding Burt in this restaurant and he was watching the food go by on the carts and doubtless wondering why he couldn’t have any, and I was hungry, and Laila was at least being civil about the delay that taking the bus rather than driving created, sitting in a corner reading past New York Times. And I felt a great deal of pressure. I was feeling intensely anxious just waiting there and I was holding Burt and rocking back and forth and I closed my eyes and allowed myself to drift up and away from the situation and I realized as I stood there rocking and feeling this pressure that everything I was responding to was external to me and that I could, in contrast to what I always do in such situations, simply relax my body and view these negative stimuli as outside of me and ultimately powerless to hurt me. This is a little bit of condensation, and not as…well, poetic…as the moment felt, but it really did initiate a change in my response to interpersonal stress that I have been trying to implement in the last week. And it has not always worked: I still get angry, and I still express it in sometimes forceful and…unpleasant ways, but it has actually made me more able to say things that I need to say in order to clear my head. But what I am focusing on in those moments is relaxing my body, and as kooky as it might sound, I am increasingly aware that the reflexive tension that rushes in to my body when I a--…when I encounter conflict or stress…that somehow that is responsible for my outbursts, my letting the situation carry me away, or at least that it is intimately correlated to it, because I find that when… Like last night, Persis and I were having a conversation that involved at numerous points her telling me and my telling her what we were discontented by in the relationship. And as she was talking to me, I was constantly reminding myself to relax my shoulders, my neck, my jaw. And as a result, I began to be able to see the anger, the reaction to her words forming in me and to instead to respond to her from a position of understanding, even while holding my own perspective as valid. So it wasn’t like a war between her perspective and mine. It was her simply articulating her discontent, which of course, involved me, and which was often hard and sad to hear, but which I was not letting get to me and make me angry as it might have two weeks ago. I don’t know if this will ultimately be good for our relationship because it will make me more likely to say those things – to realize when I am tensing up and withholding truth from her – that will not heal things.



But it does make me more able to see, I think, our situation with a greater amount of…I probably shouldn’t say objectivity…but at least understanding and compassion. But that, again, doesn’t mean sacrificing my own perspective, which I think she would like me to do. I think she sees the whole thing as a war, and that she must trump and disarm my perspective with her own. Thus every time I try and tell her what I am feeling about something that is not working out, she counters with, “And I feel that…,” and this makes me feel like she has disregarded what I have said in order to defend herself against it by rolling out her own perspective in which I am not performing properly.




I don’t know. The more I think about, reflect on our relationship, the less hope I have for it to change; and she gets mad at me about my resignation, but I really don’t see in her any willingness to or likelihood of change. Perhaps I need to change too. But one might also say that the guy who is in psychoanalysis four times a week, is trying harder to change that the one who…well than she is.

We went to a wedding, as I said, this last wedding, and I was amazed, distressed by the stultifying conversation that Persis seems very gifted at getting herself into. I have never spent so much time being so bored by someone who is ostensibly having professional conversations with lawyers, and judges. I am generally interested in people’s work, in the nuts and bolts and the conversations that go on, but for Persis, it’s almost as if she doesn’t know how to have a conversation that has a core of humanity, and instead is always talking about these professional things that she’s doing and getting on the radar screen of whomever she’s talking to.


My eyes are closing. I fell asleep twice on the freeway the other day, and when I pulled off for my exit, I pulled over and left the engine on and closed my eyes and unexpectedly drifted off for forty-five minutes. I don’t know why I’m so tired; I seem to be getting enough sleep; more I think then...

How was I going to finish that sentence…?

More sleep I think than I have been getting in Ecksville. But still eleven [a.m.], twelve rolls around and I can’t keep my eyes open. that’s a drag.

(Picking my nose.)

I am conscious, of course, of my laxity with respect to my notes to you. I am still hung up on the…

How was I going to finish that sentence; I drifted off.

I am still hung up on the…

Now I just drifted off and thought of my dentist whom I’m going to see tomorrow.

Uch. I hate this feeling, where after every concerted action, you just drift off.

Anyway. What now?

A big pause as I drift off again. Perhaps I will call it quits.

But I think I can finish that other sentence by saying that I am still hung up on both the fact that my friends are reading and also that you are not, and that I cannot be completely open with what I say. And that on the other hand…you’re probably busy with something, other things, and this is probably what…I drifted off again there…

Anyway…you get the idea…ambivalent about writing [to you]. And right now just about everything else.

A rushed beginning. Again I demonstrate my endless capacity for procrastination by using the time that Persis has bequeathed me by taking Burt on a bike ride by the river to instead of write to you (as I have been dreading all week; see, you are now a source of dread, a burden) to figure out how to download the audio version of Death in Venice that I just seized as part of my free trial for [of] an audiobook company that, unfortunately, sucks. Oh well, I got Death in Venice and The Fountainhead out of it. And Persis just printed out this article from the New York Times on the best novels (American) of the last 25 years. And of course, me being the sucker for lists of any kind, I now feel that I should read them all (surprisingly (why [surprisingly]?…I don’t know…perhaps because I like to think of myself as relatively well read; but in fact that’s horseshit: being a childraiser and being well read are, like, matter and antimatter) [I’ve read only 7 of 27).] Anyway, so I’m determined to read as many of them as I can find on audio. These, of course, are all unabridged versions. I’m not white trash.

Onward.

So the girl next door took offense, or was embarrassed rather, when last weekend I dealt with Burt’s tendency to have innocently roving hands (he does it with me all the time; the irritating habit of his being that he will not just pass his gentle hands all over my back and chest; he will, with his index finger, finger concentratedly selected moles on my back, and sometimes my nipples. This eventually sends me…well, rather it leads me gradually into a state where I would like to grab his hands and cut them off, but instead I just gently tell him that what he is doing doesn’t feel very good, or that I would prefer he touch me somewhere else, or that my nipple is getting sensitive (or ‘overstimulated’ is the word I should probably use with him), or that I don’t want him fingering my moles like that. And if he doesn’t respond within a half a second, I grab his hands and throw them away, swat them off of me like the pests they are. I am feeling as you can see a good deal of hostility toward that precious little morsel right now. More on that later.) Anyway, so Burt’s hands have started to pass over Melissa toward her breasts (oh, those breasts; I don’t blame Burt one bit) and occasionally down toward and perhaps under her waistband (that kid has…what?...good instincts), and she has gently and gigglingly pushed his hand away, which I probably should just have left alone, but instead I wanted to make sure that he wasn’t getting the wrong message (he is doing it innocently, after all), but also that Melissa have something that she knows she can tell him. So I said that if he ever starts trying to touch her anywhere that she feels uncomfortable [about], she can just say, “Burt, I would prefer it if you didn’t touch me there.” Anyway, she said, “Thanks, Josh,” sort of sarcastically, but since I couldn’t understand what I might have done that she would have resented, I just assumed she was, if not sincere, then at least not actually resentful, I don’t know. I guess I suspected that there might have been something going on, because later I asked her, in front of Persis, if she would mind if I told Persis what I had told her [(Melissa)] earlier about the touching. And she, with her knees folded up to her chest (we were sitting on a blanket in a park), said yes. And I said, “You do mind?” And she said “Yes.” That bitch. Anyway, Persis wandered away, and I said to Melissa, looking at her quickly so as not to put her…or make her feel further exposed…I said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make you feel uncomfortable.” But inside I was resenting her…prudery…no, that’s not fair…her embarrassment. I mean…well, let me just add that after that episode with Persis, Melissa decided that she was so embarrassed…or, I didn’t know what she was feeling at the time…all I knew was that a minute later she went and sat behind a tree…and it certainly seemed like she was hiding. So later after I had left, Persis checked in with her and found that, yes, she was very embarrassed by what I had said, and that those were things apparently that she didn’t, or perhaps I should say ‘wasn’t to,’ talk with guys about. And Persis brought up that she…pointed out that which didn’t need pointing out…that she was being raised Catholic, going to a Catholic school, and that this wasn’t a topic that she felt comfortable discussing. But what really makes me burn is that – and this is going to sound terrible, but bear with me, because I don’t feel like I’m being that unreasonable – judging by the clothes she wears (oof, I cringe saying that), exposing her nascent cleavage, the high regions of her lanky latte thighs (I have not yet sneaked…well, I’ve sneaked a glance, but what I mean to say is that I have not caught yet a glimpse of those lucky panties)…I should chime in here about Tracy Green in junior high, and how I would sit across from her in Spanish class in the library and find excuses to drop things and so look up her skirt and see all the way up under that institutional uniform skirt to the one and only pussy of Tracy Green, covered of course with a thin layer of white (generally; I think once or twice there was a pattern; and what an amusing, whimsical thing to see up there: a little girly pattern bedecking that womanly, hairy pussy of hers. And I say hairy not because I had to fantasize what was under that thin layer of cotton. In fact, the whole reason I would look up there was because she evidently was so overwhelmed by the volume of her pubic hair that she could not keep it inside of her underwear (I supposed she could have shaved, but per—…I wonder why she didn’t, why she let it grow like weeds in a field down her nice Jewish alabaster thighs))…and the sight of her buzzing (that was the psychic texture of the sight of her bounteous pubic hair – a buzz – as if the very sight of it was so vivid, so impoating [I have no clue what this word was supposed to be.], so real, that it not only was projected onto my retinae but actually materialized inside my head and ears, causing a buzzing as it grew, a buzzing, a muffled “whish” as those individual lucky, perhaps clean from her morning shower, perhaps glazed with…well, perhaps I am getting a little indulgent here. Let’s just leave it at that…(not that I’m afraid of getting indulgent…let me just say it, that maybe they were glazed with her secretions, maybe they got there because she had masturbated the night before, because I certainly would not be able to keep my hands off my pussy if I were her, and so fascinated (as I was [by hers]) by my public hair (I keep writing ‘public’ hair…I think I’ve discoursed on that before)))…anyway, this is all just a fantasy on my desire there in the Spanish class as I spied like an explorer in the desert happening upon a lush verdant jungle the twin thatches of her emergent pubic hair fanning, buzzing, exploding, puffing out of the two sides of her exiguous cotton veil. I didn’t always see them – and that’s what made them so precious to me, those two thatches – it was periodic reinforcement, and so I would try all the more and occasionally catch a glimpse… I want to get back to Melissa. But let me just for a moment describe (let me first leave the library with an aside about how some other guys in that class got in on the game, dropping things to look up that grey skirt, and that I have since come to feel very badly for Tracy, who probably just didn’t know what to do with her pubic hair except cross her legs and hope that her sniffing suitors went away. Poor Tracy. Much as I wish I could go back and run those panties down her legs and do a triple gainer into that lush pussy, much as I desire that, I feel for her and wish I could take her in my arms and tell her that it was no fault of hers the rude excesses of these little boys, that she was beautiful and that that was the ultimate cause of her oppression – her beauty – and that these poor boys were so (unfortunately, her most beautiful aspect was that pubic hair, but she deserved to feel beautiful and desirable nonetheless) immature because they did not know how to express pure appreciation for beauty, and that some of them (like me) would never be able to do it and that instead of feeling oppressed by them, she should feel sorry for them, that they were enduring such torture at the hands, or should I say the strands, of her pubic hair. She should feel proud, cross her legs or not, as she wished, and dismiss these sniveling horny twelve-year-old boys.)

But the first sight of Tracy (and is this synecdoche…(I saw Akeelah and the Bee last night because Reinhardt told me I should because…she said it wasn’t a perfect movie but that the message was one that I should…what?...soak in. And the message was blah blah blah we are not afraid that we are inadequate; we are actually afraid that we are powerful beyond measure)…anyway, one of the words that was spelled by Akeelah (incorrectly as it happened) was ‘synecdoche’ (I’m not giving anything away; she misspelled it in a casual…or unimportant moment). Anyway I wonder if saying ‘Tracy’ when I mean ‘Tracy’s underwear [pubic hair]’…(it’s like you could imagine a bow tie, and the two wings of the bow tie are these thatches of pubic hair, and the little roundabout holding them together was her underwear….wouldn’t that be awesome, to wear a bow tie that looked like that?) Anyway, is the whole of Tracy standing in for her pubic hair display synecdoche or…fuck, come on…what’s that other part-for-whole word that I’ve never learned to distinguish from synecdoche?…it’ll come to me…anyway, is ‘Tracy’ as in “the first sight of Tracy” when what I mean [by ‘Tracy’] is “the first sight of Tracy’s underwear with that amazingly shocking and wonderful burst of pubic hair blasting out either side” synecdoche or that other word I can’t remember?) was on the concrete overlooking the playground, where she was sitting having lunch, no chair, butt on the concrete, and she went to get up, and clearly she hadn’t learned yet (she was probably twelve at the time, or thirteen) to rise from the ground like the horses she loved, graceful and unrevealing, legs together and to the side, right?...she hadn’t learned to do that, so what she did instead was to plant each hand just behind her and then her feet just in front of her and push up like that, which would have been fine if she were wearing pants, but since all she had was that hated uniform skirt, when she pushed up to rise, her knees parted, and the hem of the dress was no match for them and it rose, and she gave me the sight of my life, a sight I will never forget and the thrill of which I despair of ever experiencing again. And in my recollection, I looked at it (it of course didn’t last long, but I swear, for the impression it made on me she might as well be there still, on that concrete lunch area, rising from a seating [seated] position in that awkward thirteen-year-old way, pussy draping out there for the world to see; she might as well still be frozen there until I die), that beautiful sight, and then glanced up at her face which was looking at me. And her expression is one of…well, much as I want to imagine that she was inviting me, saying “How’d you like that? That was for you.” Instead I think she just sort of caught me looking and registered that and probably didn’t feel much of anything except maybe thinking that I was a bit of a letch. But my God, if she knew what that sight did to my head, she would have, should have been embarrassed indeed.)

So Melissa. I’ve forgot where I left off, but…I think I was about to go off on how I de--…oh yes, what she was wearing. You know, her clothes are pretty revealing. And it’s not like...you know, some young girls (see Sally Mann’s book of photographs called At Twelve. I’ve never actually bought it because, as opposed to Immediate Family, which is one of those works of art that will stay with me forever and has shaped who I am, At Twelve makes me profoundly uneasy because of the failed, failing pretension of those poor deluded innocent and ugly girls in those photographs. It reminds me perhaps of my failure, my being endlessly frozen in a state of professional twelveyearoldness, being essentially innocent and yet sexually impotent but aspiring to power. But I’m never going to get there is the only thing, like Tracy there frozen on the launching pad (it [Tracy’s stage] wasn’t actually that space that was called ‘the launching pad,’ which was where parents drove up to pick up their kids, but it was just opposite the launching pad and made of the same white smooth concrete, so I might as well call it that since ‘launching pad’ is more evocative than ‘concrete lunching area’), pudendum exposed [hinted at] for the world to see but never actually amounting to anything, always just two thatches of promising but ultimately snuffled, stifled pubic hair.), some girls wear their innocence on their nonexistent sleeves, but not Melissa. She owns her body, at least that’s her carriage. And so when I try to be respectful and forthright about how she can respect and guard her body, to talk about it directly and simply, and to give my son not a message of shame, but one merely of preference, a simple limit rather then a condemnation, so when I go there and she goes and hides behind a tree, I have such contempt for the implicit hypocrisy of that. I know she’s only twelve (she is in fact ‘at twelve’), but you know, if she doesn’t want mature people (Am I mature? Are mature people branded still [at thirty-six] by their first glance of real live pubic hair?) to notice and address her body, then she should damn well cover it up. I’m not saying she owes me anything for her relative nakedness. I’m just saying that if she goes out in the world naked, she should be prepared to be able to have her relative nakedness pointed out to her without her having to afterwards go hide behind a fucking Douglas Fir.

So here I am, having made time during the…, to actually make up a session, instead of letting my deficit accumulate until…

I must thank again the su--…those close to me for their support. Today, I spent my therapy session basically outlining the story of my screenplay for my ther--…for Reinhardt, and she broke the therapeutic fourth wall (and felt very guilty for it) by saying…well, to comment on the complexity of the characters. Which was like manna from heaven for me, who longs for some kind of support, good feedback, dick sucking, but who is so hesitant to share anything with anyone until it (the whole) is finished and polished (cf. the episode from several weeks ago with my uncle). But today for the first time I think, I saw the whole thing, more or less. I could look down on the story and see both the beginning and the end (sort of). Much of the detail of the end is still foggy, but…

Which brings me to the question that I ended therapy on today. It was so helpful just articulating aloud my thoughts about the story that I wondered why I didn’t get off my fucking ass and get a partner. I mean, I have so hated the idea of working with someone…and it’s no secret why: because 1) my…well, vanity: a desire to claim all of the glory for myself; and 2) a fear that I will alienate that person with The Asshole.

Have I discussed The Asshole here? The Asshole is a correlate to The General, whom I think I first distinguished in your office. I’m talking now about the strands of sound in my head that make up the noise, single voices within the cacophonic chorus of my thoughts and inclinations. So The General…no…yes…The General was the first one. And early on in my sessions with Reinhardt, I started distinguishing a couple more voices. Now, I want to take a moment and distinguish (that word again) what I’m talking about from, like, Sybil. I’m not talking about fuckin’ split personality shit, whatever. I think you get what I mean. I mean…well, talking about these various colors to the thoughts in my head as personalities is helpful, much as referring to God is helpful (cf. my painfully brilliant analysis of…my stellar ideas about the nature of God a couple weeks ago). So there’s…and the names, as I’m sure does not surprise you, are pretty self-explanatory. The General, as you know, gives orders. But not just orders. He’s fuckin’ yelling from the helm of some big old tank in the fury of battle. I mean his orders are barked, shouted, bullets flying, “on your…”…no…like…“You will go over that hill, soldier!” I don’t know. It’s kind of necessary to describe not only the personality of the…what?…voice, but also of the soldier on the ground, to whom I, I now realize, am always giving short shrift. I mean, that soldier there is cowering…

NO! It was The Critic, wasn’t it? That was the first one to be described. And so reimagine the soldier caught between one voice that is giving, barking in a horrendously loud and booming and insisting voice piercing through the cacophony of war and bullets whizzing, barking orders; and the other voice that is mercilessly, with constrained tight high-pitched and disgusted tone criticizing the poor soldier’s every footstep, every twitch of every muscle, every decision. Picture that situation and you’ll pretty much have me to a ‘T’ with respect to my work.

But The Asshole. The Asshole is in many ways the most authentic ‘me’, that part of me that wants what it wants and doesn’t care who I fuck over in order to get it, doesn’t care about who I offend or hurt, who I yell at or for what stupid and unpredictable reason I do the yelling. The Asshole is an asshole. But you probably also get that, in the very naming of that voice, I have posited a countervoice, which corresponds to the ‘me’ that most of the world sees, that part of me that is trying to funnel the desires and impulses and the uncaring expression thereof through the lens of custom and acceptability. I’m sure there are probably some very basic psychobabblical terms for all this, but you can shove those right up your stinking asshole.

That was The Asshole talking. See?

So The Asshole. The Asshole is very much a presence in my life with Persis, and at the risk of drastically oversimplifying what is undeniably a complex situation, The Asshole is one of the reasons why we live such a relatively embattled life together. Me and Persis, that is. Because I allow to be expressed with her things that I would never let out on, say, a friend that I cared for. Why would I subject someone I love to such abuse? And yet that is one huge marker of my intimacy with Persis, my ability to take off all the masks with her. In some ways. As I said, this is complicated; because the presence of each other’s Asshole, I think, makes it very difficult for us to be intimate around each other in other ways. Obviously, with two Assholes in the room, there is no space for vulnerability or tenderness. There is, however, undeniably an honesty that, for my part, exists nowhere else or with anyone else in my world. A mixed blessing. Is it a blessing? I don’t know.

But I hesitated for a long time bringing The Asshole out in therapy, and indeed I am still unable to allow him to be absolutely present. It is because I like Reinhardt too much, and I feel like, even if this perception might be the first one to be challenged…well, I feel like her liking me is important to the positive course of my therapy. And of course you would say, “Why does …”, “What does whether or not I like you (or she likes you) have to do with why you are here?” And my answer to that is that she and I now and you and I then were engaged in a collaborative exploration into what makes me tick. And I really feel like that is a shared journey (Oh God, I’m sounding so newagey tonight, it’s making me want to barf), one that whether or not…

Thinking…

…whether or not I actively enlist the support of the therapist, is taken together. So I can have a therapist who is having to work very hard at keeping the countertransference out of the room, or converting it real time into some useful refined product; or I can have a therapist that is really desiring the best for me because he or she genuinely wants the best for me. Now, I am battling the critical part…The Critic…who is assaulting this very touchy-feely, innocent, ingenuous part of me by saying, “…

Well, basically I feel like this thing that I’ve just said is something that I could spend a whole session pulling apart (not in a destructive way, but an analytical way), because I’m not sure that I have accurately stated the role or the…I’m not sure that a good therapist would actually fit neatly into this either-or situation. But the important thing to get is that this either-or is real for me and is a big reason why I actually fear the appearance, the emergence of The Asshole in therapy: because I am afraid that I will so alienate the therapist that I will be left all alone with no one to help me.

And of course this is what I fear about having a partner. Besides the glory issue. I’m afraid…because remember: my Critic is very strong. That Critic has very clear points of view and very strong feelings about why what he thinks is best is best. In many ways, the functions of The Critic and The Asshole overlap, the only difference being that…

How to put this?


The Asshole is almost always speaking in the context of a frustrated desire, or a desire that, but for the actions of the Asshole, is threatened to be frustrated. So, like, he…well, “Pass the salt, Goddammit!” The assumption is that if he didn’t ask that way that the salt wouldn’t get passed.

But The Critic, though he may well speak in a voice that is similar to the Asshole’s, his goal is not the attainment of a desire; it is the…the fulfillment of a standard? The attainment of a particular grade of perfection? … Hard to parse. The Critic insists on perfection. The Asshole insists on satisfaction.

So I’m…

And I should say one other thing, which is that I am really a great collaborator. I know from my experience directing, editing, wherever I have had to (and that ‘had to’ is crucial) cooperate with people to achieve a shared end, I know from these experiences that I know how to inspire the highest contribution and to elicit the most honest conversation about…well, obviously the creative role of a director and an editor are different, but I feel like I’m exceptionally sensitive to the role requirements in a creative endeavor such that I am able, whatever my own personal role, to maximize my contribution to a high quality end product.

But again the distinction here is in the ‘had to.’ Because when I’m writing, I don’t envision myself as ‘having to’ work with anyone in order to achieve a shared goal. No one shares my goals, and fuck anyone who claims to. It’s My goal. Who is anyone else to come in and tell me, or presume to have even an opinion on why I should do this or that before I’ve sent the product out the door?

And so I worry about joining together in a sort of creative marriage with someone because I feel like I will have to sacrifice the ability to express either The Asshole or The Critic. No, that’s not what I mean. I mean that if I allow myself…and this perhaps gets at another part of my personality, The…what’s the name of that reptile that changes colors? Shit, I don’t know…I’m blocking it. Chameleon! The Chameleon. It’s that part of me that has no voice but just enables me to meld into whatever situation I’m in and fulfill my particular role. Anyway, I cannot both be a Chameleon and an Asshole, so I will either have to sacrifice what I want to the greater good of the creative community (the partnership) or risk destroying the creative community in order to achieve and express exactly what I want to without regard for another person’s feelings or perspective.

Now, the voice in the back of my head (let’s leave it uncharacterized and just take that as a cliché) is saying, “Wait a sec. There is always sacrifice for the sake of the creative community. There is never any getting away from it once the work is shared with anyone.” And that’s true, of course, if one intends to do anything with anything that is not destined for a desk drawer or the top shelf of the closet. But isn’t there something to be said for a phase of the process where the artist, the craftsman, satisfies himself? Without regard for considerations of the market or civility? I don’t know. Maybe Roger Vann would say there isn’t. And I think of him because I think of that day that we (he and I) had lunch at the mall and he kind of pitched me his idea for a TV show based on a kind of American School in some third-world country, or something, and I had the sense that he was sort of proposing that we work on it together, sort of an overture to a partnership (this was before he had anything like a script or an agent to show; this was like at the very beginning), and my response to it, insofar as I remember it correctly, was not even at the level of liking the idea (and it’s hard not to bring to bear the things that I have since learned about the requirements of television) or not; it was about whether I wanted to work on it with him. And it wasn’t even about him. It was about whether I wanted to work on anything with anybody. And I didn’t. I absolutely didn’t want to have a…, to work with a partner.

And now I look back on that and I wonder if I was a fool, and I think that maybe, given my experience articulating my story this morning in therapy to someone, anyone, having a partner to bounce things off of on a regular basis in an atmosphere of mutual trust and support would be the absolute best possible thing that could happen to me right now. The only tricky part is that it would have to be someone whose work I respected enough that I would not have fears of dissolving the relationship by virtue of my honest response to his work, because I could not censor myself that way and really feel like I was being myself in the relationship. I’m not saying there’s no place for constructive phrasing. But I am saying that I would never want to work with someone whose instincts and tastes I so distrusted that in order to seem not to be an Asshole I should have to be a liar.

Anyway. This all evolves. My time’s up. This has felt like a particularly trite session. Good-bye.

Okay, okay, okay. I’m just so…I’ve been grousing (as I wrote to Onyx today…see, she’s more faithful than you are; she tells me that she’s still reading, a voice from the void; you, on the other hand, stay silent. How like you. If only you could see me with Reinhardt, her talking, like…well, a lot) about having to write you (having, I say) and not feeling like it, feeling like I wish I could just give up (and if there weren’t other people depending on it, maybe I would, I said that last time). I just don’t feel like there’s that much wrong these days. Though that feels like a paltry excuse. It’s this four times a week thing. Writing to you has always been the fifth, and now four has even started to feel excessive. Forget about taking an hour on Sunday; it’s just too much. Can’t I have a three-day weekend from this?

So. What to drag out and tell you about that I haven’t been talking to Reinhardt about? What that’s not just a repetition of what goes on with her? I could tell you about Burt’s new thing: as we’re going to sleep, he wants me to lie on my stomach (he has already asked me to take my shirt off) and he then just lies on top of my back and falls asleep. It’s the most wonderful thing ever. I could tell you about the Verdi concert, how the choir has become this huge great thing and I can’t get enough of singing, and two weeks ago I volunteered to sing at a master class (at which the soloists who were singing in the concert gave notes on our amateur presentations), and that at that class some guy came and had…anyway, I was introduced to the soloist and right behind him was this carrot-topped guy who said, “Are you the Joel Geller who was editor on All Hands?” It was so random. Anyway, this guy tracked me down by googling me; I suppose he got my name through the people/person who I was…see, I don’t know how much you’re missing at this point. Here are some background pointers:

1. My agent told me that someone was looking for an editor to work on a small independent film in Ecksville.
2. I went after [pursued] that[ opportunity], read the script (lame), met the director (lame), and [now] figure that the project is going to get stuck in casting, but then again, you never know. As crappy as it’s likely to be, I would jump at the chance to do this.

So this guy Carrottop Fred tracks me down at this master class (my name was on the program that was posted on the Ecksville Choir website) and offers to introduce me around at the studio complex up here, and I go and I meet with the people (person) over there. And get this: the guy I’m meeting with, who’s the gatekeeper at this studio complex, is this Indian man with I’d say about 80% fluency in English, heavy accent, utterly humorless as far as I can tell, and he tells me very early on in our meeting and without a jot of irony that at one time he (who is dressed in a crisp white shirt and a tie) owned all of the doughnut stores in town, and he adds that he got out of that business, but that he now owns one remaining store out on Highway 86. And he gives me, at the end of the tour/meeting, a small piece of paper with two email addresses and about six contact numbers on it, the last of which is the number of his doughnut shop. And he says that I can use that as a last resort, that I should be able to get ahold of him at any time, but if that for some reason I can’t, I can just leave a message for him at the doughnut shop. Now, putting aside the interaction of…well, how best to say this?… I mean, he’s this Indian man talking about owning – indeed, having a monopoly on – doughnut stores throughout the city; my stereotype bells are going off like crazy. But putting that aside, I wonder whether it bodes well or ill for the film industry here that the head of the production facility can, as a last resort, be reached if necessary by leaving word at his lone remaining doughnut shop out on Highway 86. I don’t know.

Anyway, that’s the story of the week around here. And that’s about the most significant thing I can tell you.

(I feel like this is one of those episodes of The West Wing that takes place almost entirely in flashback.)

Or I could tell you about how that episode [my memory of] when I was…I know I’ve told you about this. I must have been about five, and I was in my room, and for some reason I decided that I wanted to make a BM on my floor (it was carpeted), and not only that, but to do it in, like, four separate piles. And so I do it, four congruent piles (in retrospect they are on the big side – I mean, I don’t know how little five-year-old me had this much shit in him) on the rug, in one line parallel to the front of the house, a kind of drizzling of breadcrumbs to help some lost traveler find his way from one door of my room to the other. And as I finish, or some time shortly thereafter, I…well, I don’t know, maybe I stood there admiring my handiwork, so to speak, or maybe I decided that I was going to let my sculpture sit for a while, but I remember it as being just as I was finishing the last pile, at that moment, my dad comes home. And my room is right inside the front door, and I know that my dad’s first move when he gets in the house is going to be to come into my room. And he doesn’t even knock. He enters, pokes his head in, and I remember myself as trying to stand, like, such that…well, between him and the piles, so that he cannot see them. But in retrospect, I feel like I cannot have been tall enough to keep him from seeing the piles furthest away from him. Anyway, so I’m standing there, and I say hi to him, and I’m rooted to the spot, and he says hi to me and he says, just before popping his head back out of my room, he says, [with a benignly curious updrift in his voice, as if he were musing entirely incidentally to what was going on in the room,] “Something smells like BM in here.” (That word, that term causes me such embarrassment, for a variety of reasons. I guess the first is that it is so nonstandard. Whereas it was the way I was brought up to talk about shit. Not poop. Not pooh. Not ca-ca. BM. Only it doesn’t, didn’t, occur to me as an abbreviation, since as I was learning the term [‘BM’, the uncompressed] ‘bowel movement’ was beyond my lexical capacity. No, instead of ‘BM,’ I think I must have thought of it as beeyem, or beyem, biem, biyem. Maybe biyéme. I don’t know. As a word in its own right. But more specifically, the sound of that word came to represent for me the sound of the very act. If you say it, for example, in going from the ‘ee’ to the ‘yem’, the tongue retreats back slightly in the mouth, pulling on the salivary seal between the tongue and the cheek, causing little bubbles and crackles. And I associate this sound with the bubbles and crackles that happen as the BM emerges from the butthole, and the skin of the anus (from the turd’s perspective) retreats around it and causes that same sort of…how to describe that sound?…wet yet solid…you get what I’m saying[…that bubbly, crackly, moist and sticky shit sound]. And not only that, but the brightness of the ‘ee’ followed by the deep and echoey ‘yem’ suggests to me the emergence of the turd and then its shooting down into the water, a ten-point dive, and banking against the ceramic gullet of the toilet with that deep watery metallic sound that ceramic makes when something impacts against it while it’s under water. “beeee-YEM(n)” It’s the sound a diver makes when breaking the surface if you’re listening from inside the pool, underwater, like. – In any case, the word embarrasses me because it is nonstandard and because whenever I say it in adult company, I feel like I am a little boy again, one who does not know how to talk about his beeyems.)

So my dad says that, about something smelling like BM, and then he leaves. Just like that. Now, you would think that I would have breathed a huge sigh of relief. But, see, the problem is that I have never believed that my dad did not see the piles. And I could go into the whole long chain of association that this situation has produced in conference with Reinhardt (and since I, upon looking at my watch, discover that I still have fifteen minutes left, perhaps you will yet learn of some of those associations), but… Well. So I have always, on some level, believed that my dad saw the piles and either chose to ignore them, or more likely knowing my dad, simply did not know how to deal with the fact that he had walked in on his young son as he was just finishing up shitting in a few demure piles on the floor. And [I am not exaggerating when I say that] that shit, that discovery, that dissimulation, the shame and relief, the fascination and the…well, perhaps I should say the curiosity and then the killing of the cat…that episode, those images have proven to be among the richest and most potent of my entire therapeutic life. I mean, without belaboring each link, I’ll say that there is a quality of the artist present in that little boy, a quality of the rebel whose roots are in simple questioning but who is forced through the rigidity of custom to assume a posture of defiance, a desire for connection with other people, a shirking of mortality… All of these have arisen in my consideration with Reinhardt of those little piles of shit, and my dad’s oblique reference to them, his evasion of them.

Part of me wants to go deeper with you here, but I am going to put this on hold, partially because I do not want this to be, as I said before, a mere recounting of This Week In Joel’s Therapy. We’ll see if I get anywhere else, or if this is what I have to return to.

Anyway.

I guess I’m just saying again what I think I must have said last time, which is that there doesn’t quite seem enough wrong with my life these days that I need that fifth day of therapy. There was once. But now, between therapy and medication and adjusting, things are okay.

Except for this: one of the other things that came up today around the shit was this…well, let me see if I can reconstruct this (I have been having a very difficult time of late reconstructing where I’ve left off in therapy, even the day before)…the upshot of it was a feeling that I needed to get out of Ecksville, and I think that had something to do with…well, maybe it was the shit, maybe it wasn’t, I don’t know, but I might as well just come out and tell you… I went to the annual potluck that my choir has at the end of its season and it was just a bunch of older middle aged men and women thanking the people who had volunteered this year and announcing who would be volunteering next year… I mean, it just felt like this total…whatever…Kiwanis Club, Elk Lodge, old people in small town stuff, and it just made me want to run screaming from the state.

I don’t know. There are times when things feel like they are moving forward, that I am making the best of a suboptimal situation (like this weekend, when I passed my real estate license exam); and there are other times when it just feels like I am making the best of a situation that will always be bad and that the end result of that making-the-best-of will only be my making myself feel just kind of okay somewhere that I will spend the rest of my life being stifled by. Lots of prepositions floating around in there, but you get the picture I think.

Anyway, a minute left. I have been spurred on by Onyx to try and make up some of the lost sessions with you. It’s good to know that someone is out there, even if you’re not.

God, do I not want to write you today. I get in these Sunday moods, where the only thing I want to do is my own stuff and catch up on… These days I have been trying to file away past bank statements for a couple of weeks. Isn’t it amazing how much energy it takes to put a pile of papers in chronology and stick them into a three-ring binder? Astounding. And I complain about how hard it is to write a screenplay. Jesus, I can’t even organize my own room, let alone a 120-page dramatic story. Who am I kidding?

But I started this entry out with God, and I realized that I wanted to put down, so that it was official, so that you and I could… I bandy the idea of God about a lot. And I don’t know if we’ve ever talked about what my conception of God is, because the truth is I’m a little self-conscious about using that word, that idea – of God – without a set of disclaimers. After all, I went to the Ivy League. I am very intelligent. I am able to see that God is a creation of man. I am the Post Structuralist mind. I am being facetious in all of this. The…well, wait. This is how I should have written all that: “I Went To The Ivy League. I Am Very Intelligent. I Am Able To See That God Is A Creation Of Man. I Am The Post Structuralist Mind.”

That took more time than it should have, but you get the idea.

Anyway, so I wanted to set down in black-and-white what I mean when I say God.

I have already discussed here my idea – I would like to lay claim to it, put a flag in it, and I don’t care if I sound pretentious, inflated like my lactose-intolerant belly – it is My Idea that (at least I have not heard it anywhere else as far as I know) religion is an adaptive trait insofar as it frees up a species that is prone (and I use that word ‘prone’ very consciously) to rational inquiry…the idea of religion in such a species frees up important cognitive space for useful, productive activities (hunting, gathering, developing tools and weapons and the like, smoking pot)…frees up cognitive space that would otherwise go toward the exploration of essentially unanswerable questions. That is, by positing a God, or a system that explains many of the unexplainable (either from a rational perspective at all, or at a particular time in a species’s technological development)…what?...inexplicable phenomena or ideas, a species has more time to increase its lead over competing species. Nevermind that it induces, at a certain point, some members of the species to totally retreat from productive society. This, from my perspective, is akin to the phenomena of worker ants, say, who perform necessary functions in a colony but are doomed to never actually reproduce with the queen. I don’t know if I’m accurate on the ant lifecycle here, but I know this phenomenon occurs in nature. Those who stay indoors studying Torah are in fact answering the questions for the entire tribe so that the average tribe member can go out hunting or bungee-jumping or whatever.

Anyway, so clearly this would indicate my feelings about religion as an evolutionary artifact, and not any accurate explanation of the universe. For those questions, again, that religion supposedly answers are precisely and by definition those that cannot be answered in any more satisfactory way. It (religion) is a set, in other words, of explanatory fictions that free the mind from unproductive endless inquiry (hmm, perhaps I should take a lesson from that).

This suggests that my idea of…well, it suggests that my…it suggests that I’m an atheist or at least an agnostic. But I don’t feel comfortable with either of these labels. They don’t really get at the (oh God, I’m sounding like Persis) ‘nuance’ (she has made me hate that word; everything in her world is nuanced; she brought home a book by some Oh-So-Brilliant scholar on race and culture and I read the jacket flap and felt like I got a pretty good idea of his ideas. Then Persis asks if I want to read it and I said that I read the flap of the dust jacket and she says, “His idea is pretty nuanced,” and I said, “Well it sounded like the ideas on the dust jacket were pretty nuanced.” What a load of crap. Yeah, Persis, that’s your shit in the toilet. “I don’t know, it looks pretty nuanced to me. See the way the turd has little lumps and crevasses. See the way it tapers at one end and breaks off abruptly at the other, suggesting that, at the time it emerged, there was still some shit left in my butt. That’s pretty nuanced.”) of my feelings.

I have decided that I feel about God the way a mathematician must feel about imaginary numbers. He might agree that they are imaginary from an absolute perspective; nonetheless, they are very useful. The idea of God is useful. Talking to God, thinking about God, addressing God as if he were up there and listening is comforting. It satisfies a true need. The idea of God is important to my sense of who I am. And the issue of whether the thing, being I am addressing is real or not is beside the point. So stepping back and asserting my true lack of belief is actually detrimental to my emotional, psychological health because it jeopardizes those creative, strategic fantasies that make me feel not alone in the world, and destined for something other than just the grave.

To advertise my atheism would be the same as my articulating my some nonbelief in the value of therapy simply because my ‘knowledge of myself’ is ultimately unverifiable and in the grand scheme of things irrelevant. [I don’t know if this is very clear. I think what I’m trying to say is that, if I am essentially an atheist – that is, one who accepts the nonexistence of ‘God’ – that fact is trivial compared to my belief in the utility and helpfulness – to me, personally – of the idea of ‘God’. So the comparison I’m trying to make with therapy is that I also find it so helpful that the fact of its unfalsifiability is of little relevance to me. In general, I think it is this personal experience of the helpfulness of an idea of ‘God’ that leads me to be extremely suspicious of professed atheists. First of all, you have to have a pretty clear and limited idea of something in order to profess nonbelief in it; so I kind of see professed atheists as people with either un-worked-through authority issues or a lack of imagination.]




Anyway… I feel like I’m forgetting something.

Ah. So I guess I see God as this adaptive personal fiction, a managed psychosis insofar as one gives one’s life over to something as real as the voices in one’s head in order actually to remain productive, to keep oneself from despair (I guess that’s another way in which religion is an adaptive trait: it not only frees up cognitive space, but it keeps a creature prone to rational thought from slipping into unproductive despair.)


So you might ask: What the hell does all this have to do with my writing you?

Well, I don’t really know. It was on my mind, and I didn’t really feel like delving into anything, so I thought I’d discourse on my contribution to theological philosophy…sorry: My Contribution To Theological Philosophy.



So I guess the question is what’s going on with me.


Oh go to hell.


Don’t I discourse enough on my dark diverticula enough Monday through Thursday? Of what value, really, is continuing to write to you? Yeah, sometimes a nice little gem emerges, but this is really starting to wear on me. I’ve been thinking recently of abandoning this and just sort of saying a nice good-bye to you at the one-year mark. Which is rapidly approaching. Or maybe I should wait for the one-year mark of my not seeing you in person anymore. The truth is that if this were not a public thing I don’t know if I would have kept it up. I don’t know if you alone would merit a weekly anonymous note. I doubt I would have posted these online for you alone. I mean, why would I go through the deception, the potential hurt of this blog just for you? You don’t really deserve that. You’re not, for all your wonderful…for all of your contribution to me, someone for whom I would sacrifice my marital happiness. Keeping you in the loop of my life is not something so important to me that I would risk really hurting Persis. And yet maybe I would have wanted other fathers to see this, other men who are struggling with the same issues of self definition as I am (I am starting to be a little proud of my functions around the house, and to feel actually like Persis, immersed in her world of work, of examining closely her shit and the shit of others, is actually divorced from reality; and that I, in dealing with my needs and the needs of my son and our household, am truly the one who is dwelling in the real world. If I were to disappear, her world would collapse. Mine would get a little trickier if she disappeared, but I wouldn’t be as out to see [sea] as she would be. Ha.), and maybe, without a group of friends out there to occasionally read my stuff, and for that to help me feel like I was still connected with my old life – and this is important: that, I think, is the most important function of this blog right now: it helps me to feel not isolated, still in touch with my old life, even if symbolically. Interesting: here I am considering the value of this weekly posting, and talking about God in the same therapeutic breath; when it turns out that in fact God and this blog play the same role for me: they are fictions that I defend and willingly engage in because they help me to feel in touch with myself and the world and creation, and to feel like I am not alone. I guess there are no accidents after all.

Anyway, I don’t think, though, that keeping my old friends in the loop…oof, this almost pains me to say, would sustain me forever. I mean it does sort of feel like hanging on to a world, a reality, that no longer exists. Like fooling around with former lovers. And that’s true not just in terms of my relating, communicating one-sidedly with friends from Platte, but also to you. There’s a congruence there: I have a therapist here, so why should I spend my time continuing to write to you? I have a life here, so why should I spend my time nurturing a life that is not likely to return in the near future (which phrase [clause] I append out of a vestigial hope that it might actually one day return)? I guess if I knew that friends were actually reading this on a regular basis, if it was really important to people to keep up with me on a day-to-day (or at least week-to-week) basis, I would feel differently, but the truth is (and part of me resents this, part of me feels like this is testament to the fact that you rarely know who your true friends are but sometimes something happens that separates the real ones from the imposters) that they have their own lives (and although part of me resents that they can’t spare fifteen minutes a week for me, part of me understands that absolutely: how many of my friends from Platte do I spend fifteen minutes on a week? My God, I haven’t even made the time to read Ryan Speck’s script yet (though not from a lack of desire). Part of me understands that many of the relationships that I consider dear to me are built upon distance, upon lack of constant updating, and are in fact important to me because they do not require constant updating. And that the relationships that no longer serve me in this context I have allowed to languish and decompose back into the earth of my life. So perhaps it is too much to ask even those friends whom I value deeply (regardless of whether they can spare the quarter hour a week)…well, I mean perhaps it is too much to ask that they spare that fifteen minutes. Perhaps it’s actually irrelevant. But that then doesn’t water down my sense that maybe that’s a stupid reason to be writing, that the people whom I care about don’t need to spend fifteen minutes a week on me. They and I do what’s necessary to sustain and nurture our relationships…and no more. Why do more than that? It is a waste of resources. Of course this can become a circular argument, because it perhaps assumes that people only do what they need to in order to preserve their relationships…it begs the question, in other words.

But I guess what I'm leading toward is this…well, back to this question of why I continue to write, whether it’s really for anyone but myself, and if it really is the lifeline that I imagine it to be. Maybe it’s just a selfserving habit that I will never…that is a waste of productive energy. I rarely go back to read over my journal from late teens and twenties. (Though, in fact, when I do, it is extremely valuable to me.) I don’t know where all this goes. I just didn’t feel like writing today and I have been wondering whether to continue. If no one needs me to do this but me, then maybe all of these fantasies that I’ve built up around continuing to write and post are silly, time-wasting fictions, and that no one will suffer or even notice if I get real and stop. Of course, I know that some people probably do read, if not regularly, then at least on occasion; and perhaps, like my journal, the only time this blog really matters, or would really matter, is when you or a friend logged on and it wasn’t there anymore.

I suppose it’s just as well that I haven’t gotten the time to update you since my trip to Platte last week. I was planning on sitting down at my parents’ house last Sunday, but not surprisingly the time just never materialized; and then all week I was planning on catching up but then that time never materialized, and now I’m one behind, owing you a session if I’m to make my…this is how I think of it…perfect year of missives. Not that I intend to stop there, but it would be nice to have averaged one a week for a year to see where I’ve come and where I’ve come from.

So it was just as well because now the acrid (I thought of that word before I sat down; maybe that makes it trite) taste of my time in Platte [has mellowed a bit.] I always forget how hard it is to step out of my life and see what I’m missing here, at the same time realizing what I have [gained], but what really killed me about this visit was that every advantage seemed like…as if I were getting a heart transplant from someone fifteen years younger. “Hey, I’m gonna have a heart that’s younger than I am!” Cold comfort. Like the traffic and the parking. Cold comfort for the loss of friends and family and that life I lived there. I was especially…it was after a breakfast with my friends William and Charlie, and we got into this big thing about elementary schools and the things that Charlie was telling me about them were harrowing, made me despise those institutions…but strangely every log that he piled on the fire of my fury at Platte elementary school admissions procedures, instead of making me grateful that I didn’t have to experience them, made me miss being in Platte even more. As if what I wanted most in the world was to be able to be in Platte and just go through the admissions process with Burt, just so I could get the opportunity to tell all those supposed educators how fucked up they were. So that I could take out my anger at them. And somehow the feeling that I didn’t have to go through that process made me feel like I wasn’t good enough to go through the process, that moving to Ecksville had made me less tough, less cutting-edge, that God moved me there because he thought I couldn’t handle it [(i.e., life in Platte)]. That’s good [I mean that that is a good articulation of what I was feeling, not that it is good that I was feeling that.]. I felt throughout the whole thing, just as I feel when I hear Charlie or William talk about the meshugas they go through in their jobs, or Roger Vann…this is exactly it…when I hear them talk about their meshugas, I feel like, “God, I wish I had such problems,” and I am reminded of my feeling that God has turned his back on me (a feeling which is now outdated, obsolete, for reasons that I hope to get to today…so much has happened), but in this case he hasn’t turned his back on me, he’s just thrown in the towel on my part, realized that his Chosen One couldn’t handle the stress of succeeding in Platte, but instead had to be moved out to pasture in peaceful, quiet, beautiful, white Ecksville. I mean, with a name like Ecksville, it’s gotta be anodyne to the core. It’s like my dad moving into…Woody…God, I’ve forgotten his last name, too…Bill’s friend, the wine guy I love, who wishes I was his son…I keep thinking of Woody Adelsheim the billionnaire, but this is precisely my point…anyway I was going to say that Woody asked me what the name of my dad’s retirement community was and I had forgotten it amazingly (all I could come up with was Saturnine Swamp, which you may recall from an earlier post…er…session)…and now I can’t remember Woody’s last name but instead want to give him the last name of someone who is “in the thick of it”…that’s what I want to be. “I want to wake up in the city that doesn’t sleep to find I’m king of the hill, top of the heap.” That sums it up, too. Anyway, I feel contempt perhaps (although not only for this reason) for my dad’s moving into that R.C. because I feel like it is an analogous movement of me to Ecksville. Where does Ecksville get its name, anyway? From Mr. Eck? It makes me think always always of the really nerdy guy at Miramar named Eugene Ek. Just Ek, E-K. It’s such an ugly name, Ecksville. It’s like moving to a town whose name is Booger, or Armpit. I am ashamed by its very name, independent of the fact that I have broadcast to the world my unsuitedness to city life and competition by moving here and that I am ashamed of that and think that that is what everyone thinks of me when I tell them that that is what I have done.

Anyway, so so much for the [elementary] school thing. That was bothering me for quite a while. I couldn’t figure out why the hell I actually wanted to go through all that, aside from my fantasy of making the admissions people at those schools feel shame for their misguided…their having wandered astray from the path of education and instead having gone down a path of mammon worship.

But what I referred to earlier about the being angry at God that I talked about last time…not that I can’t summon up those feelings…but I realized that those feelings…well, I don’t know about ‘realized,’ but felt at my core for maybe the first time…those feelings of having been the Chosen One abandoned by he who chose him was a projection of those expectations that had been placed in me by really well meaning and basically benign sources…like my mom’s encouragement, my parents’ encouragement, my teachers’ encouragement. And support. I think of…well, I’m hesitant to spend all this time rehashing what has already come up and out in Reinhardt’s office, but one of my key images about my sense of myself as a writer is the appearance of my poems in the Miramar Talisman when I was in early grade school. This was one of those creative writing compendiums that everyone gets something in, or almost everyone, and I remember how proud I was and my mom was of me that…proud of the stuff I had written, and how my mom has always told me what I great writer I was, and it has rather naturally instilled in me this sense that I am a great writer and thus an idea that maybe I could actually be one. But this is then tempered by the fact that I recognize, somewhere inside me, that my image of myself as a writer is still based on an image that was created when I was, like, seven years old. And that when I say I am a writer and I get this aching knot inside me at the absurdity and presumption of that statement it is because I see myself saying, “Yes, I, Joel Geller, thirty-six years of age, am a writer; and if you doubt me, just look at this poem that I wrote when I was seven,” and sensing precisely the absurdity and presumption of that statement. This is interesting. Despite the fact that I have produced any number of things since then – not perhaps as much as some of my peers, but still – my image of myself as a writer is still based on the printing of those poems in the school creative writing compendium. It doesn’t help that I haven’t really had a significant job as a writer, though even that is not entirely true, my having made five thousand bucks to write a script that was…or at least I imagined the people who paid me ultimately thought that it was a waste of money. Anyway. So part of me is this little seven-year-old who is really proud of my writing and wanting to be a writer, and part of me is this merciless critic who pounces on the very idea of a seven-year-old thinking that he is a “real writer.” This is kind of twisted. I wonder where I got this from. I remember once when I was younger having a list of…I kept this list on a legal pad…it was a list all of maybe a page or two long…of one-line or two-line description of movie ideas. And one …I’m trying to remember it…and it’s making me sweat just thinking about it, actually. Anyway, let me preface this by saying that I shared one of these ideas with my uncle at a family party at my house, and I remember him responding to it by poking a hole in it, suggesting some angle that I hadn’t thought of but needed to if the idea were to be viable. And I remember…it’s weird, I don’t remember feeling terrible at the time, other than maybe a little ashamed, but not anything earth shattering. But that is one of the things, moments, I think of when I think of the critic in me, and where it was given its voice…I don’t know. I don’t associate it with my mom, although it sounds (the critic voice) like that tight strained quality her voice gets when she yells. But my uncle. Come to think of it, I have several not very positive associations with him, though I am always trying to get back to…I’m glossing over a lot because I feel this is irrelevant strangely, my relationship with my uncle? I mean who really cares? I’m not that close to him, though I feel bad about this. And I feel bad about the fact that he and my mom (they are the siblings) are really not even in touch anymore. I’d like to be in touch with my cousins, his kids, but then again there are a lot of people I’d like to be in touch with. Anyway, he’s the person I supposedly, at least my mom tells me, I supposedly take after with respect to my irritability and depression. And she is always saying how he needs medication but has never had it. And I think she has referred to him as critical…I don’t really know. It’s weird. My relationship with him is, like, in the penumbra of my life, of my set of relationships with people, and that’s why I’m actually a little embarrassed about talking about him, because I feel like…what is it?…“Oh, come on, Joel. He’s your uncle. He’s not anyone significant. You’ve barely had any contact with him over the course of your life.” And yet I have very strong feelings about him. I remember him fondly. I think of his warm fuzzy hugs when I was little…at least that’s where I imagine I get that image from. I think of that cardboard picture poster my mom had of him and Sheila when they were young, she while she was still young and thin with long straight hair, and him looking like someone painted him with glue and then rolled him around on the floor of a barber who caters to black people. I mean this guy was fuzzy. And they both had these big smiles (him and Sheila) on their faces. And every time I think of him or see him I long for that smile, that fuzzy warmth, that big deep joyful laugh that I somehow associate with him. But I have not had that I think since I was a kid, before I could form images in my head, specific ones, that would last. I only have this sense of him, vague and yet peculiarly specific in certain ways, that ever since I could think really, or relate to people and keep track of a relationship with specific snapshots, has never come back. And that makes me sad. Instead, he is the person who cut down my script idea, who made a negative comment about Muslims based on having read the Koran and [having] been repelled, who yelled at me when I accidentally pointed the air pressure-operated rocket I was learning how to use and which he had bought me when I went to visit him for a week in Chicago…when I accidentally pointed it at his face. I didn’t mean to do it. I didn’t mean to hurt him. [I didn’t hurt him; the rocket didn’t go off or anything. I’m just saying that its pointing at his face was inadvertent and not out of any desire to injure him.] But he yelled at me. And that same trip having let Darrell [my cousin, his son] fall down the stairs in their house (Darrell is about five years younger than me…maybe seven?...and I think I was about ten at the time.) And I remember him having told me to wash in my crack when I was taking a bath, and that’s the first time I ever remember having washed there. And he didn’t say it nicely. He said it like I was stupid for not having done it. There are a lot of memories I have of him, specific memories, as not being a really nice guy. And yet my essential picture of him is...not picture, but feeling about him…is of the fuzzy bear hug and the deep world engulfing laugh. Sad.

So what else?

There were a bunch of things that came up as I was writing about the elementary school thing, but they seemed to have slipped my mind.





I’m curious about what this connection with uncle means. Why he should come up so strongly as I’m thinking about my sense of myself as a writer. I mean, there’s that time he…this was the idea, as far as I could remember it: well, one of the ideas was that…oh this is stupid. It’s not that I’m not willing to tell you, it’s just that…I don’t think the ideas actually have anything to do with my psyche. They’re just interesting details.

Oh well. Now I have to tell you them, because otherwise I’ll feel like I’m withholding, ashamed of them, giving into my critic. [I also wanted to talk about them out of a sense that, theoretically, my labeling them as irrelevant even though they were on my mind might have been an instrument of repression; and out of a desire to resist that repression, if it was being brought to bear on those memories.]

One of the ideas was for a movie called Changing Times, and it was based on the idea…or an assumption rather…that evolution occurred in discrete moments of time…that, say, Man would go along, and he would suddenly evolve…or any species. And that Man was in a period of not…it had been a while since it had happened. And all of a sudden, it happens again. Man begins to evolve and it creates these two humanoid species who end up not liking each other very much. But on top of that, what scientists discover is that the intervals between these evolutions is shrinking, historically speaking, and that there’s some…I don’t know…crisis generated by the fact that Man begins to evolve at a faster rate than he had before. Thus (and this was something that I was proud of) Changing Times was a double entendre for both the fact that times were changing in the Bob Dylan sense, but also that the time, in the sense of ‘interval,’ between evolutions was changing. Get it? Huh? Huh? Get it?

But that wasn’t the idea my uncle shat on. The one my uncle shat on I’m having a very difficult time reconstructing; perhaps I’ve repressed it. It was about a boy who could cause things to come into being. Like, you know…I don’t know…telekinesis except it’s…what?...teleontosis. And maybe he discovers that he has this power, and that’s part of the movie. And then…and this is the image that I have of the story, the image that I think of when I think of my uncle’s reaction…it’s a scene where our hero causes a plane to come into being high up in the sky. He’s…I even envision the place that he is: on the corner of El Camino and Manson, like, crossing the street from Wiltshire Presbyterian to Wiltshire Elementary…and he blips a plane (ostensibly full of passengers) into existence. And suddenly he sees another plane in the sky, one that wasn’t there before, one that he and we somehow know was also blipped into existence, and the two hocus-pocus planes crash into each other head-on and there’s this huge explosion and all these people are ostensibly killed and our hero is surprised, to say the least. And the thing I can’t remember is if it turned out that there was another boy, a bad seed, who had developed the same powers, and he and our hero become, like, superhero enemies. Or if…and come to think of it, maybe this is it…our hero ends up not being able to control his ability to create things and he starts, like, fucking things up but is unable to stop himself. And then, I don’t know, he goes into therapy or something; I didn’t really have that part mapped out I think. But what my uncle said, and I remember his criticism very clearly, even if I don’t remember the exact words with which I communicated to him this idea…(and my time is up, but getting this all out is important)…I seem to recall that this was one of my first times, if not the first time, sharing an idea with anyone. Maybe that’s not true. Maybe I had shared them before but other people were just more polite. Anyway, but this feels to me [now] like it felt like a significant moment [then]. Like we were at a family party, getting food off the table (bagels and lox, I think), serving ourselves, and I mentioned maybe that I was writing down some ideas for movies, and maybe Uncle Frank asked me what they were. Or maybe I volunteered it, I don’t know, because I was proud of it (and these two that I’ve shared I was proud of – actually the other one that I had, or another one of the several, was to turn Ray Bradbury’s short story “A Sound of Thunder” into a movie, which has since been done, albeit with apparently terrible results (see, they should have come to me)), and when I told him the idea he told me that I hadn’t considered, or needed to think about, or something like that, the responsibility that would come with having that kind of power. And it wasn’t, like, Yoda telling Luke Skywalker that being a Jedi Knight brings with it responsibility, or something like that. It was a guy telling me that my idea was incomplete, unformed, inadequate because I had not considered or incorporated this aspect, this consideration.

Anyway, that’s I think why I decided never to share an idea with anyone ever again until it was finished.

Goodness, now I could go on with what actually trying to be a writer has done to [reinforce] that feeling, but that’ll have to wait until next week. Tune in next time to see Joel retreat into his hole and basically never come out.