Happy Father’s Day. I’m in my house in Ecksville, amid a slew of opened but not emptied boxes, in a corner of my office, trying not to focus on all the work I have to do to feel settled, which work will not even come close to being completed before I will feel pressured to start being productive with my writing, which means that…I don’t know. It feels like a long time before I’ll feel settled, and that really eats at me.

I don’t have anything to do.

I am not a productive member of society.

I feel worthless.

I feel awful for feeling that way because of course raising my son is both valuable work and…well, it’s valuable work, and why doesn’t the time I spend doing that satisfy me? Yesterday I started to feel so intensely unstimulated. I was trailing Burt around while Persis did the unpacking…that’s the other thing. I am colossally bad at the whole moving thing: packing, unpacking, arranging rooms. I just want it all to disappear from one house, appear in the other house, and do so in an aesthetically pleasing fashion. Instead, I am constantly disappointed and frustrated that it actually requires input from me. Persis and I have started getting in this circular conversation where she will want my input on…say, how the bedroom is arranged, and I will only be able to tell her what I think is wrong with it. And it’s not that I can’t, don’t see that I’m not being constructive; it’s just that I don’t know what is going to make the room look better, I only am able to identify what’s wrong with it. So she tries to get me to engage constructively and that makes me feel more incompetent because my head just doesn’t work that way. And I’m creative enough in other ways to know when certain connections are just not being made in my head, and to know when there’s something that other people are much better at envisioning than I am. Persis’s not an expert at it, but she doesn’t throw in the towel the way I do. Anyway, so that’s a source of tension. And then Persis feels like she’s doing all the unpacking... which is true, but I’m watching Burt while she’s doing that. Blah blah blah. A bad situation. I just want it to be over.

And at the same time, I’m anxious about it being over because I know that there are some rough days ahead of me on the screenplay. I’m at a point where…I went back and watched Dog Day Afternoon again recently. Don’t know if I already told you this, but… The bulk…or a significant portion of my script is sort of a siege, with a small group of people trapped, essentially, in one place. And this siege is the forum for the exchange of perspectives that is really what interests me about this subject, the confrontation between a porn star and an abstinence…I don’t really have a good name for this woman, generically speaking. “Porn star” sums up a profession, but…what?…abstinence worker? Religious right woman. Church lady. Abstinence bitch, perhaps. Anyway, so what’s so great about Dog Day Afternoon (and movies of its kind, of course; it’s just one of the best movies of its kind) is that most of the movie is a siege where characters are frozen in place, and yet it’s incredibly taut, and great at revealing character. And so I want to have these characters reveal each other, but I have no idea what happens in order to have that happen. And I don’t even know everything that these characters will end up revealing about each other. But I really like my idea, and I just have to remind myself that there’s always a point in working with even the best ideas that there are lots of holes. If there weren’t, then writing would just be typing. Envisioning what happens in those holes, I fear, is not a great skill of mine, either.

Or is it.

See, this is maybe one reason why the move and rearranging my stuff in this other world is traumatizing to me, because it’s like the world is teasing me about how bad a writer I am. The world is reminding me that when I come up against those holes in my writing, I also panic and don’t know what to do. The difference, though, is that I do have a set of things I do in order to find good things to fill up those holes, whereas with interior design, those holes don’t go away. They just sit there, gaping, and I try to imagine where I could move the bed in order to make the space in my bedroom flow better, and it comes up, like, empty set. Nada. And I’m afraid that’s that what will happen when I sit down to write; that I will not be able to rearrange the elements of the story to make it flow.

I’ve been working, sort of, with a writer – he was Persis’s assistant – a big, fat, arch, affable mid-40s guy who is clearly as desperate as I am to achieve success at writing. One difference is that he is also naïve in ways that I hope I am not anymore. He gets a little too excited each time I tell him that someone might be interested in seeing his manuscript (brief summary: he’s writing a novel that he’s trying to get published and at the same time get to any Hollywood people he can; it’s not a great novel, but it’s kind of a cool world with sharply defined characters, and I could see it being successful as, like, an HBO movie, so I’ve been trying to show it to a couple of agents I know). And I look at him, and I look at me, and I realize that there’s probably very little different between us. He’s really desperate to make it as a writer, and honestly, I don’t think he will any time soon. His novel doesn’t have a great story, and though his writing has some really good moments, there just aren’t enough of them. He’s not, like, hopeless; I could see him getting it together with a really good editor. But…I’m afraid that I’m him. I mean, sure, I like my idea. But who doesn’t like their own ideas? A lot of time I feel condemned, given the path that I’m on, to be this failed writer, whose greatest achievement in life is raising his son. And I love my son, I want to mold him into a positive addition to the human race, but I don’t want him to be the thing I’m most proud of in my life. I want to do something. Something I can point to and say, “I did that, and if I hadn’t it wouldn’t have gotten done.” And I don’t want to get bogged down in the stupid argument that no one else is going to raise my son for me. That’s not what I mean, I want to make something, change something. And I’m worried that I’m going to keep beating my head against this writing wall and it’s just not going to fall down. Granted, I’ve framed this script as being my last big push. I feel like if I churn this thing out, make it what I want it to be, and it still doesn’t get me anywhere, I will have no real reason to keep going along the entertainment road…unless I like the script so much that I try to make the film myself. But then I think of all of the films out there that get made because some poor sod like Persis’s former assistant Lukas likes his script so much that he decides to make the film himself. And what’s frightening, is that the success stories all sound like the failure stories…the only difference is that they are successes. “I believed in myself. I felt like the market just had to be out there.” Blah Blah Blah. I mean, I see where this train is heading, and I really don’t want to go there…but hope springs eternal.

The triumph of hope over experience.

That was someone’s quip about what second marriages were, but it applies equally well to me.

I’m not so sure I’m that excited about my marriage either. I don’t know. I keep seeing these people whom I imagine are living much more interesting lives than I am… Forget that. I just can’t believe that I am what people talk about when people speak of being “happily married.” I really don’t like being married that much. I don’t like Persis a lot of the time. We’ve had sex…I mean intercourse…I think once successfully since Burt was conceived. I don’t really think she likes sex all that much, and I don’t really desire her all that much. She’s a ball of neuroses, and I wish deeply she would go into therapy, but I don’t think she ever will. I’m amazed that Burt is as happy-seeming a kid as he is, because we squabble in front of him all the time. Of course, we’re always around him, and we’re always loving toward him. But I worry about what he will experience living with us. I’ve gotten myself convinced that I don’t deserve any better. I’m just a passive, depressed chicken-shit who relies upon mood stabilizers to get through his day and get along with his wife. I start revising my messiah complex and vesting Burt with it. My destiny is to beget, not to be, the messiah; and as such, it’s no surprise – or no cause for concern – that my life feels so uninteresting and relatively…dare I say unhappy?…as it does. Unhappy. It’s mostly happy when I’m around Burt. It’s occasionally happy when I’m with Persis. But she’s not someone I trust with my deepest self. She’s someone I keep from seeing it. And I think she would say the same about me. The idea that she is supposed to be my best friend is, like, a tragedy. I have abandoned my best friends in order to be with her, and to start this institution called a family that, while I have moments in which I understand why some other people would die defending it, I basically could take or leave. I would much rather continue to be a part of my mom and stepfather’s family. I wish Burt and I could go and live with them. That would be lovely. I have thoughts about what would happen if Persis died, if Burt died. If Burt died, would Persis be able to comfort me or I her? I don’t think so. Sometimes I hope that the acid that causes her gastroesophageal reflux and which I imagine causes the drab appearance of her teeth, and which I fantasize causes the acidity of her personality, is causing a tumor, eating her away from the inside. That reflux is one of many ailments. Reflux, dust allergies, a sore shoulder that keeps her from lifting Burt, tooth problems. And an inextinguishable sense of guilt.

Time to go. I’m gonna try to make this a Sunday thing.