My mom and stepfather in town. I gave Bill my last entry to you to read. You might ask me why; two reasons: 1) because I wanted him to see how badly I felt, since I really wanted someone who could help me to know…and I thought he might give me some…I think this is what I was after…I was hoping he might give me some perspective on whether what I was feeling was cause for medical intervention (that is, on the part of my own psychiatrist; and by intervention, I mean a change in prescription). I'm a little embarrassed that I did that. I’m uneasy as I recount it to you. It makes me feel…wimpy. Why can’t I just wait and tell my psychiatrist how I feel and let him make the call? More on that (I think) in a sec, but the other reason I wanted to tell Bill was that…and I wrote this in the piece…what do I call it? Piece? Entry? Session?…that I had had a conversation earlier with him in which I had gruffly told him that I couldn’t be more specific about everything that was wrong because everything was. And that made me…left me feeling like I wanted to be able to tell him, but didn’t want my Mom to hear. Lots of feelings about all this today, as they are both in town, as I said. Anyway, back to that other thing. They make me feel like I’m a little boy. I feel like such a failure after being with them. I showed the thing to Bill and we talked a little about it and he said his overarching reaction was that I needed structure. He said this in a caring way, that this is what he was concerned about (I told him that I wasn’t showing it to my mom and he understood why that would be the case), but still…and I even agree with him (wrote “me” instead of “him” before changing it). But it makes me feel like…what am I doing here, trying to make a career as a selfstarter, when I need a parent (and me at age 35, no less) to tell me that I need more structure and on top of that to know that he is right. Also, my mom can’t stop correcting how we’re parenting. In little ways. She thinks this thing is dangerous, she thinks he needs to be more stimulated. I feel like dirt…a little kid. And I can’t tell Persis about it because she’ll use it as...’it’ being the fact that I feel that way…as ammunition for her own rants about my parents.

I want to succeed as a writer. I think it’s possible for me to do so. But there’s so much pressure to just give up. Be realistic. Be practical. Every fiber of my being – nice cliché – shouts this almost as loud as it shouts, “Of course that’s realistic and practical, but that’s exactly why you shouldn’t give up.” Then I start again to feel like an idealistic fifteen-year-old. Does anything miraculous ever really happen? Do people ever finally make it? Or is it always a case of the overnight sensation taking thirty years to happen? Thirty years of uncelebrated work, or thirty years of lonely unproductive obscurity? Cause I’m definitely heading toward the latter.

I’ve been thinking I should look into getting an office. Just renting an airconditioned room in some building nearby, that I could go to, to be away from this house and all of my stuff here. That’s definitely a move toward structure. I could certainly afford it, few hundred bucks a month, maybe. Just a room with a desk and air conditioning and a plug. That’s how I wrote the Holocaust script that I was working on years ago.

I’m afraid to get high. Bill was asking me why. I haven’t gotten high – did I tell you this? – since I got here, and part of it is because I’m afraid to. The last few times – I should give you the punchline by saying that I got a little high this morning [But just to be clear, this was written in the afternoon, sober once again.], sort of an experiment – it’s made me more anxious, angry, confrontational. That’s not something I need. But it’s also not something I can really predict anymore. So I’ve been wary about it doing that to me. But here’s the other thing. I realized as I was coming down off my gentle high that one of the reasons I respond badly to it, is because toward the end of the high I realize that…or maybe this is just…I don’t know…maybe I'm just making up a reason after the fact…but I really feel disappointed to be coming back to my life. I get to leave for a couple of hours, and I really enjoy that. But then I have to come back and deal with it. I can’t stay in that mellow, everything’s-gonna-be-okay place because everything’s not gonna be okay unless I get off my ass and do something about it.

I imagine my mom criticizes me for being passive. She was suggesting…it’s almost not worth the trouble describing the situation…she had offered to take Burt to a park, and I said that would be fine, and then I went off and followed Burt around the house, letting him go where he wanted…wait, she said that he needed something more to do. Aw fuck, I’m all tangled up I this. Let me see if I can describe what happened.

Thinking…






My mom brings Burt back from playing with him, says she’d be happy to take him to a park. I feed him some pineapple. She says she’s going out to the porch. He eats some pineapple, then wanders out to her. I say that if she really wants to take him somewhere, I’ll go check on his schedule. I go up to talk to Persis, who’s upstairs talking to Bill (talking about how our discussion about getting lunch went wrong [More meshugas. No time to go into it here.]). She and I decide or work out that mom and Bill will take Burt to a park. I go back downstairs. Mom is in the playroom with Burt, who has a plastic hanger in his hand. My mom points out (in a kind of bitchy way) that she thinks it’s dangerous. I say, “Well, it’s not a wire hanger.” I want to tell her to shutup, she’s always making these little comments, like I said. I wish she would just trust that we are conscientious parents and that if she sees us seeing Burt carrying something that we will take it from him if we think it’s dangerous. She appears to have no real faith in our judgment as parents. And then she goes and does the thing that she did when she was on the porch: when Burt was initially reluctant to come to her, she fake-cried. My stomach turned. I considered my reaction, perhaps longer than I should have, before saying that I wanted to ask her not to fake cry in front of him because I don’t think he could tell the difference. It was very interesting; she was pretending to be rejected by him, crying because he would not come over to her. And I thought, “My God, the effect of that upon a child who doesn’t know the difference between fake and real crying…” I don’t actually think he got it entirely, but it did kind of shock me. And that’s something that really wouldn’t have shocked me before. I mean, I fake cry on occasion, if I’m wanting to communicate that a way that he has touched me hurts. I try to show him in terms that he can understand. But to fake cry because he does not want to come over to you? Maybe she was feeling sensitive because I had pointed that out, and that’s why she got on my case about him running around the house instead of being out at the park.

Am I a bad parent? I’ve always trusted that Burt would be able to communicate displeasure and that if he were bored, he would make himself known. Rather, if he’s running happily around the house, there’s no reason to rush him off to a park just because I as an adult think that that would be more fun for him. That’s a classic case of projecting onto him my own preferences for fun time, rather than considering his behavior as the best indicator of his satisfaction.

But then when I just followed him around the house some more after she said those things (I know I’m not making any temporal sense here; don’t want to take the time to make it clear; I know what I’m saying), she then got mad and said that she was starting to get irritated because she didn’t just want to wait around. So I said, “I thought you were going to the park.”

“Sure.”

“Well then go ahead!”

But in fact, I was acting as if she were responsible for the communication delay, whereas I had just wandered off with him not in any particular hurry to make any decisions. And so I’m afraid she thinks that I’m passive, and that’s why Burt is unstimulated, because I won’t get off my ass and take him somewhere. I just wanted to laze at home.

I don’t have what it takes to be successful. Persis talks about cultivating a relationship with the daughter and granddaughter of the Provost of the University, who she has been told can authorize funds for the hiring of an individual faculty member in the event that there is not financing available through traditional means. This is something I would never do. I would never cultivate a relationship with someone…well…is that really true? I feel like I wouldn’t cultivate a relationship for the sole purpose of getting some sort of professional advantage, but in fact, many of my personal relationships are that way…I don’t know about many. Some. Friends I have and keep because of how useful they may be to me professionally. People I’ve been friendly to in order to make good impressions and get ahead. I guess I do do it. But obviously not with the right people, the people who can get me where I want to be. I guess it’s just another way of saying that I’m not happy with where I am, and bemoaning…or looking for excuses for why I am not there. I read a blurb in Variety today; a blurb from the lead actor in the show House, who was nominated for an Emmy award, and he said something like the nomination validated his choice to become an actor, to try and make a living at it, because he’d been doing it for 20 years and wondering the whole time, “Am I really an actor?” And then I have these sickening insights as I’m lying on the couch watching TV for the first time since I’ve been in Eugene, insights where I realize that by working so inefficiently I am essentially postponing the rest of my life. I am frittering my life away – without exaggeration – each day that I allow myself to dally in front of my laptop. This idea that the script is a major undertaking, a long process, really makes it convenient for me to just kick back and work slowly. Whereas, if I characterized it as a short process, maybe I would finally get off my ass and start hacking away.

I wrote a fun interchange on Friday that was basically the meat of what I wanted to explore. It was a dialog (strictly a working scene, just one in which the characters artlessly debate a particular point) that condensed into a few pages the reason why I was interested in the idea of a porn star and an abstinence activist meeting up. I hope I am able to translate that this week into some continued progress on the structure of the script, which remains that most challenging aspect.

Sleepy. Feel disjointed. Maybe it’s not such a great idea to write too close to the…to a particular event. The coals haven’t really subsided yet into a clear…what?…what do coals do? Anyway…




Days are not bad. When I’m not thinking. But when I sit down to write these, the gloss is ripped off. Can’t disguise the fact that I’m unfulfilled, disappointed in myself, and impatient. I can run, but I can’t hide.

Wish Burt would stay away for a week; I’m developing an affection for my life before kids.


What else?


Wandering. Running down the clock.


Two and a half minutes left. I’m confirming Friday at 11:30. My plane gets in – or is scheduled to – at 9:05 at the airport. Shouldn’t be any problem getting to you, and I’ll call if anything does come up. Just wanted to let you know about that possibility. Didn’t want to come in Thursday night because it’s hard for Burt with be to be without me.

Almost done. Falling asleep. Will go take a nap till Mom and Bill get back, and polish this later.




Waiting for the bell. Here it comes. Taking off a few seconds early.

Burt’s 15-month birthday. Trying to write in the dark beside him because he’s had a bad couple of nights and I’m sitting here as insurance against him waking up and my having to go to him. That’s what it’s been like all day, all month, all year, all my life it seems like, and today was a day where nothing went right, or rather everything went exactly as it would be expected to go…which is to say that it went not the way I would like it to go. I can’t stand living through my life right now, and when Bill called tonight and he asked how I was and I said bad, and he asked me to be more specific and I told him that I couldn’t really because everything was just bad, and that it made more sense (although I guess I didn’t tell him this, now I’m just riffing) it makes more sense to ask what isn’t going badly, and tonight the only thing that didn’t (I mean, today, all day) was dinner…making dinner, because as soon as Persis and Burt got involved it all went to shit. Why can’t I just go away somewhere in a cave, and have what I need and all the time I need just to do what I want to? This whole reproduction/marriage thing is just…This actually bears some time to try and express what I think about it. Not that what I think is original or meaningful in any way, but just so you know where I’m coming from (I am not having a good day. After I see you next Friday I am going to see my psychiatrist and I will entertain the idea of some adjustment in my meds because I have days like yesterday where everything seems to look up, and then days like today come along). So the whole reproduction marriage thing. It feels a lot of the time like something the species has made necessary, and in order to get it accomplished it makes having a family seem like it’s one of those things that belongs in the pantheon of goals that a person might aspire to over the course of his or her life. But, in fact, and this is the very reason why the species has to put such a goal on a pedestal, is that this goal is really a distraction from all other goals and doesn’t even feel as significant or important as the other ones most of the time – I'm speaking of those goals that are for oneself – and that if it were left to simple, objective desire to attain such a goal, the species would die out. I feel swindled, like I got something I never bargained for. I want out. Not out of this marriage, not out of this fatherhood, but out of the life that chose it and I want instead to take a “do-over” here and just go back and reconsider the whole enterprise at the moment that Persis and I were to move in with each other. I could live forever in my little cottage at the corner of Croesus and Best and work.

Mother fucker. I’m through. I have been co-opted by the species drives.













Writing isn’t going as well as I would like it to. It never is. Why the fuck can’t I just accept that I am not a writer and move on. I do not want to give in. I am hanging on to the mast through this storm and by the end of it I will be battered, old, and useless to the world, and may not have even attained my destination. I am a lawyer. I should be a lawyer. What dark spirit instilled in me this desire to make things? To be original. What a disaster. There are people like John G. Roberts – did you see the article in the paper today, that basically just goes over his life and says, “This guy did everything right, everything he needed to do to get to this place.” I have done nothing right, I have wandered and (I wrote 'wondered' instead of 'wandered,' then changed it) reached goals that I then discard and now I am just wandering more, eking out a couple of rough scenes a day in the “four hours” that I have allotted myself to write, most of which is taken up with paying bills, investing, masturbating, dancing around the act of writing. And at the end of the day, I have jotted down a thought or two, and while I always tell myself that I am moving forward slowly, I am not convinced of that. I am moving nowhere slowly; that is my fear.

I am having a bad day, did I say that yet?

Last week Persis and I got in a bad fight, and at the end of it, after we’d had a time-out, I went over to her and put my hand on her shoulder and said, “You’re in a professional crisis, I’m in a professional crisis, we have a one-year-old, we just moved to a new city, we have no friends…I think we should cut our relationship a little slack.” This felt wise. And yet I want…I mean, I want to chalk all this angst up to adjusting to a new life, but the reality is that I think this angst is my new life. Taking care of…I HATE TAKING CARE OF BURT!!!!! I love him. But can’t I just watch him while I’m reading? Can’t I just sit back with a drink and do my stuff and watch him? Why does it have to be so all-consuming? I have come to the point where I DREAD the part of the day that involves me watching Burt. I want to go to sleep. I want to put him somewhere familiar. I hate driving with him and yet I feel this enormous pressure to do stuff. Persis is always lining up these fun things for us to do and I try telling her that if she wants to do those things that she should go do them with him, that I take care of him in my way, and she does in her way. But really I just want to crawl in a hole, and I’m just trying to find a way to entertain Burt that leaves me closer to my hole [I wrote 'whole' for this last word, but corrected it at the spell check stage; another case of a significant homophone]. I often have a good time when I leave home, but I hate leaving home.

My brain is malfunctioning.

People are not supposed to feel this way over long periods of time. It just doesn’t seem fair.

I’m a whiner, a rich-boy lazy whiner.

A counselor-like guy at the end of high school (I think I told you this) in a round-table sort of going around the room and everyone commenting on the graduating seniors…anyway this counselor – the leader of the group; why did he do this to me? – said (I remember it in a sort of, “Well, this is your problem, so good luck to you" tone) – he said I was fragile. And I’ve spent much of my life trying to prove to him that I’m not fragile (in my head; I don’t keep in touch with him) which actually just proves that I am fragile that I was so discombobulated by something that one person said to me one night at the end of high school. I take all of these things that happen to me so heavily. I am feeling the weight of all of the people who have wronged me. All of those things are dragging me down. I cannot get out from under the weight of these responsibilities and…even writing you (we might want to talk, by the way, of seeing if you know or can find me a name in Ecksville; I’m feeling like actually seeing someone once a week might be in my future)…(although that would be another strike against the writing; this is some of the best writing that I do, the most honest and useful to me; why would I want to not do that? This keeps me in touch with myself. I’m sick of analyzing and trying to figure out what’s wrong with me. I just want to get on with my life, at the very point that I have backed myself into a corner and so cannot do so)...writing you is this huge thing…I didn’t make the time on Sunday, yesterday, and then I really wanted to make time for my screenplay this morning, and Burt is sick so he's taking a tremendous amount of time to put to sleep…and I just looked at my watch and found that I didn’t press the start button on the timer. So I don’t know when to stop.

Isn’t that the theme of my life: I don’t know when to stop, when to give up. What really is the difference between high frustration tolerance and high risk aversion? You know, you don’t want to stop doing what you’re doing because you’re afraid that nothing else will be as satisfying as you imagine what you’re doing now would be if only someone would pay you to do it, even when you have skills that would make you very suited to…

This whole entry feels like a wasted rant. I am broadcasting all of the minute (huge) things that make my life…

Spiritual torture…

To go through. That’s what it feels like right now. I am enduring spiritual torture. To say that…you must think that I am a wuss, fragile, an effete rich boy. Imagine…I think of some pictures that…Salgao, I think…


Web moment… no, can’t, my network adapter is too far from the base. Anyway, pictures of coal miners. And I think of them and I feel like I have no right to be complaining. The people I encounter every day: the plumber, the grocery clerks…I mean, what fucking right do I have to complain? I should go get a real job, like coal mining, and then see if I’m still obsessed with this ridiculous notion of spiritual torture.

Spiritual torture. That’s the best articulation of what I’m feeling right now that I have come up with. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to articulate that.

NOW FIX IT, GODDAMMIT!

My promise. All gone. Sitting in the dark, ice cubes melting in a nice little tumbler of gin...yes, I’m having a drink, mother fucker – I really want to try writing to you stoned one day. I’ve …we brushed over this once…I’ve never been stoned around you, and it’s always engendered in me this very open, reflective, undefended state that it seems to me would be very conducive to…anyway, maybe some day.

What a waste of your time this has been, to read this. And I still have…I don’t know. Twelve or so minutes to go.

Persis and I had sex yesterday. It was good sex, and we both felt warmly toward each other afterward. Then time passed, and things are back to normal. Burt is walking and getting harder to manage. I want to be supportive of his exploring…but only those things that I want him to explore. I carry him and kiss him and feel love for him and at the same time can’t wait to…for someone else to take care of him. I must believe that all this time I am spending will be worth something someday, because right now it feels like a stupid waste. I have never done so little for so long. My brain is atrophying. I can feel it, hear it pulling away from the meninges as I watch Burt chase a floppy green ball across our nice sloped grassy lawn. I have become a character in Blue Velvet that the camera passes at the beginning, waving, stupid, unknowing, innocent, a waste of breath. I am a waste of breath. I am here, I live, I do some things, I give birth to another person, and I will probably go my way to dust like all those other forgotten people and perhaps someone will decide to read my obituary and that will be it. No desire to hurt myself, by the way, just a grim awareness of the yawning years of boredom and lack of stimulation or achievement or pride that lay ahead of me.

You didn’t talk about this in your little fatherhood book.

Being a family man is not for everyone, right? Maybe I missed the warning signs. Maybe I should have…

I’m getting bored of listening to myself. Feeling sorry for myself. Want to do those things that will make me feel better, but there is no time. No time. No time. No time. I have a head full of things that I want to do tonight but must focus on those that will keep me from going crazy if they’re not done…I mean, make me crazy if they’re not done. Tonight it will be laundry and Goldberg. No chance of getting the unreimbursed employee expenses stuff together so I can file my taxes (for which I have an extension). No it will just be washing the first away. Bleaching the clothes, bleaching my mind, so I can wake up and face another fucking shitty day of underachieving and boredom. I know why people turn to drugs, I want something to make my days interesting to me. Occasionally I have these moments where I say, "You know, I could just sit here and watch Burt and try to appreciate the little things, the feeling of uncontrollable buzzing tickling warmth that I get when he does certain little things, and just enjoy that.” I could aspire to be the Buddha. Fuck that noise. It lasts half an hour, max. Then I’m back to, will somebody please beam me out of this. Why can’t I just watch TV?

Okay, that’s about it. You sort it out. I don’t know how to make myself better.

Still like pulling teeth to get myself to…no, wrong analogy. Just very difficult to seize the time. That was more the reason I delayed than anything. Too much going on. I feel overwhelmed and drowning. I can’t keep up with all the stuff I have to do. My office floor is still hidden underneath a thick blanket of paper and debris and boxes from the old house. Persis says she now smells a bad smell every time she comes in; some combination of piss and shit. Perhaps it’s my personality she smells.

I’ve been a real stinker lately, and as usual, Persis manages to make the issue all about me and my temper. I’ve come to the conclusion that I like my temper. It feels good to get angry and to express it. It keeps me from feeling that I am turning into my dad, which dawned on me the other night after a particularly unhelpful session of faux couples therapy Persis and I had. It was the first time we had sat down together in quite a while. (I think I told you that we had this periodic practice of sitting down once a week and trying to have a talk like we might have had with our couples therapist. It proved very helpful, even though, of course, it might have been even more helpful had we gone. I feel very self-conscious about underestimating the importance of therapy by the way. I’m going to say this now, even though it feels off the topic of what I intended to talk about. I feel like, a couple of sentences ago, I couldn’t just have said, “It worked as well as if we’d had the therapist there,” because I would have imagined you regarding me then as one of those people who pooh-pooh therapy (those who generally need it most), and as therefore stupid. So I feel like I have to add a disclaimer saying, “It might have been even more helpful had we been in therapy,” so as to let you know that I know that simply talking to each other is not as good as the real thing. I need you to feel that I am smart, and therapy savvy.) And there was a lot to clear up…(sorry for the long parenthesis; I had to refer back to my last sentence…and now I’ve forgotten what it was I was writing about exactly, and it’s kind of cheating to look, but it feels important, so I will.) My temper. My dad. Anyway, I had gotten really mad. Okay, this deserves another paragraph.

My temper has been mounting. I feel like…and this is something that I’ve synthesized over time, because it’s never…ahk, too much to say. Okay, start at the beginning.

I feel like, for the most part…

Persis has always been, for lack of simpler…more specific yet pithy term, a bitch. And a long time ago in our relationship, I was feeling trampled on enough by her that I began …that I made the decision that I would, in the efforts to show her how I felt, how people felt, when they were around her, that I would essentially treat her the way she treated me. A long time has passed since then. But what I have found is that that doesn’t work (surprised?). Instead, I have become as unpleasant as she is, and we are bogged down in a long, slow power struggle that, in my opinion, stems basically from her rough personality. I have become so good at treating Persis...at being Persis, that I can no longer control it…except I am starting to want to. I am starting to feel like I really do not like the person that I have become in this relationship, and that I want to go back to the person I think that I was before I started trying to mirror her in the relationship. (Here, I feel the compulsion to start stepping back and playing therapist while acknowledging…by acknowledging that my perspective may not be accurate. This need to pull back and evaluate myself from a supposedly objective perspective in order not to feel stupid is not an incidental part of my discourse about my own feelings. I just don’t know what it means. It is, I think, at heart, a fear of admitting that…I am wrong?…what is it that I am evading? I’m evading the…see, when I listen to people talk about their feelings, and I try…I go into shrink mode…there’s always this edge of contempt: “I know you better than you do.” It occurs to me that it is the critic talking. And when I begin to talk about my own feelings, the part of me that is listening to me says, “You’re sounding so simple, petty, like everyone else, typical. Your feelings aren’t special, sensitive, attuned.” And my pseudo-objective observations are meant to counter this feeling, so as to say, “But look. I am very sensitive, intelligent, unusual. I can…I realize that what I am saying is vulnerable to the same selfsubverting…lies…failure of perspective…that everyone else is, and I am salvaging that…my perspective by stepping back and making these observations about myself. I am special.” And I think that really comes into play with you, since I really want you to feel that I am special and intelligent, one of a kind.)

So I want to go back to the person that I feel I was before I started mirroring her. The problem is, I’m afraid I’ll get walked all over if I do that. If I just do everything she tells me to, and answer all her questions, and follow all her instructions…This is so typical. The other night…I know this is a diversion…But after this rocky therapy session, after the insight about my dad, which I’ll try to get back to, in which therapy session I said that if my problem was my temper hers was her criticalness (by which I was referring to that part of her that makes her tell me how to do things all the time and inquire constantly into how things are being, have been done…the bossy part that is never satisfied with how someone else does things even while enlisting that person into constantly doing things). And, like, an hour later, she comes into my …where I was working, and she says, “For our next session,”…hold on, some background. We had agreed to have another session the next night (didn’t happen), and she had come in to talk to me in the kitchen, where, at close to midnight, I was eagerly gobbling down some muesli I had made that was really, really good. So she saw me eating this muesli at night (though I had ostensibly made it for breakfast, of course,…and Persis is always put out when she sees me eating at strange times, or especially when she sees me eating something that’s inappropriate for the time, e.g. breakfast for dinner). Anyway, so I was gobbling down this muesli and she comes in and she says something like [She didn’t just say this out of the blue; she made it clear that it was a response to my eating the muesli.], “I know you’ve expressed some sensitivity about your weight, and I often don’t know how to be helpful to you about that. So for our next session I’d like you to think about how I can be helpful to you around that.” Now this was astonishing to me, though I didn’t let myself express any feelings beyond, “Persis, that’s a double insult, and you’ll find out why tomorrow.” See, I hadn’t expressed any misgivings about my weight to her in that conversation, nor had I…did she, I thought, have any right to dictate to me what I should think about for our next therapy session. I mean, can you imagine the nerve? I think clearly, she saw me eating and she had misgivings about my weight and was trying to find a “polite” way to say that. But you have to see how this way of expressing herself instantly creates a relationship between her and me in which I am somehow doing something wrong and that it is up to me to “think about” (sounds like detention: “Josh, I just want you to sit here and think about (and she did use those words) what you did wrong.”) how to help her fix it without making me angry. That’s the other side of it, by the way, she doesn’t want to make me angry. Over time, you see, I’ve started to get angry at how often she does these things (I’m now talking about creating this implicit stern teacher/wayward student relationship in her speaking to me.) And as it happens more and more, which it does in times of stress, which is to say times like now, I get madder and madder at it because nothing I do to try to point it out to her ever works, so I think maybe if I say it loud enough she’ll hear me. So I yell, which then doesn’t ever make her say, “Gee, I guess I was sounding like the school principal there.” It just makes her say, “Don’t get grumpy.” So then, not only am I the wayward student, my response is itself further evidence of my waywardness. I love it so much when she tells me I’m doing good, that she appreciates me, even the smallest little appreciate lights me up and makes the burden of whatever I’m doing disappear. But instead, I have this…

I guess that’s what I was trying to get to, because now my mind’s blank. I have turned her into my mother, my principal. But I don’t want her to be that, and I don’t know how to respond to her in a way that expresses how disrespectful and belittling those kinds of rhetorical acts are. Because the things that she performs them over…like the ostensible subject of our next therapy session…are small. So me getting angry over the putative relationship in which she’s cast us in her request becomes me overreacting.

And just the other night…last night?…what was it?…um…There was another Persis rant.

Oh well, I’m thinking again about my father and my temper, and wanted to say that it dawned on me that the reason I like my anger and my temper so much is that it is one of the principal signs that I am not yet entirely my father. My dad is one of the least angry people I know. He’s just there. No edge. And there is cause for anger in his life. There is, anyway, plenty about his life that makes me angry, so why shouldn’t he be angry about it? So my anger feels like a full expression of me and who I am and how I am different from my dad. But it genuinely has gotten a little more strident recently, and I’ve started to do things I’m really not proud of…this is embarrassing…like call Persis names in front of Burt (I called her incompetent the other night – I’m confessing to being the wayward schoolboy – and a couple nights before that suggested, in front of Burt, that she used every excuse she could to not be with him.)…I have not done anything physical, but sometimes I fantasize about it like I do about killing myself when I am depressed (that happened yesterday, a telltale sign). Hitting her becomes an image that itself, in the act of imagining it, becomes a solace, a baffle against actually following through on it.

Times like yesterday afternoon, when I was just in a vague daze and…and this is strange…the image of killing myself didn’t provide me with solace and the idea of living didn’t either. I just kind of felt like, “Fuck. I’m stuck in this crappy life. I can’t kill myself, because of Burt. I can’t leave Persis because of Burt (“leave Persis”: one of those soap-opera-y locutions that indicates a very long chain of associations and ideas and so feels like a dishonest shorthand; it feels like a convenient evasion of all of those ideas and an invocation instead of a simple image that connotes the mere surface of what, in fact, it means; ooh, cool idea; I’m sure somebody’s had it already). I’m trapped. And resigned. I’ll never amount to anything professionally, never be proud of myself again, maybe I’ll becomes a sleazy real estate broker, but basically I’m fucked. My ship has sailed. And sunk.

Persis last night as she was going to bed came in and asked if she could help with our cat…

Why?

For his fluids. [We have to administer him IV fluids because of his kidney problems.]

They’re already done.

Oh, when’d you do them?

A while ago.

And when she entered, she also asked me if I would at some time in the next day, install one of our DVRs to the TV so she could watch her go-to-bed-reality shows, without which she cannot relax. [Persis’s routine every night is to lie on the couch and watch TiVo’d reality shows (the very stupid breed) until she gets tired enough to fall asleep. Apparently these shows are the only shows that allow her to relax, and she currently has none available to her.]

Then she said goodnight and I muttered goodnight in a way that made her ask me if I was mad at her. I told her, still kind of muttering, that her entire project in coming into the room was to ask me to do one thing and check if I had done another. Then she said, “Well goodnight to you too,” again, implicitly denying that there was any concrete content to what I was saying and implying instead that the whole reason I was saying it was due to my bad mood.

Must end, already over. Will send the check today or tomorrow.

Using my time writing to you as a distraction, procrastination. I should be working on my script, but of course, as I can’t fucking help doing because I’m a limp weak, lame, lame lame, unprincipled lying, small writer of a writer. Because of all this, I can’t help but delay, delay, delay, stringing my family out while I diddle, doing taxes, writing useless letters, self-indulgent letters to my shrink. What a fucking waste.

Okay got that out.

Persis is a bitch, have I ever told you that? I have no confidence that she is on my side. I hope she fails. Academia is such a sham. It’s all these people with ideas that are small but who think they are actually much larger than they are giving each other head about how brilliant they are and encouraging them to go on and do their mediocre work that they talk about as if it’s the sixth book of the pentateuch. Don’t ever let me go that route. I would just rather write my stuff and have people like it or not. I like it. I think it’s worthwhile. And my job as a craftsperson is to convince people of that not by the strength of my rhetoric, but by the power of my work itself.

Anyway.

Went down to visit Dad and the Babster, as my ex-boyfriend C-- used to call her. Depressing. They’re moving into this old-folks home, I think I told you. And we visited it. And it wouldn’t have been so bad if they just said, “Yeah. We’re moving into this old folks home and we’re looking forward to it and we’re happy about our choice.” But they don’t. They say, “Isn’t this place lovely? Here are all the great things you can do, and here are all the things we can do together to not make it feel like an old folks home.” Pitiful. My sister checked it out last weekend, before she came up to visit us over the fourth, and she had a similar reaction. The place is up on a hill overlooking the highway, with Farmer’s Pride (you know, the produce delivery company) headquarters below them, which prompted me to joke that it made sense since they had such great fertilizer. That was not, of course, to my dad’s face, but in the car. I made a number of such jokes.

My dad continues to be the paradigm of unconsciousness, and I pity him. I am afraid to bang on his cage because, 1) children aren’t supposed to do that to their parents…and, well maybe that’s the biggest reason: I’m afraid of confrontation with him. But the other reason is that I’m afraid it would make him upset, and that’s not really the reason I would like to do it. I would like to do it because I think it would enable us to dwell in the presence of the truth. It is true, so it seems, for example, that he is confronting his mortality these days. I mentioned that Babs mentioned that he was afraid that he was not going to live a lot longer because of his genes. I think I also mentioned that last year they went on a cruise of the Panama Canal, before which my dad exhibited a customary but exaggerated flurry of information-giving (this is how to get in touch with us, this is where are wills are, etc.…theoretically justifiable, but still strange stuff when you’re talking about taking a vacation), that made me want to tell him to calm down. (I didn’t.) I also mentioned that his dad died in the Panama Canal aboard a cruise ship, a connection that my dad gives no weight to when I asked him about it. Apparently, they’re going on another Canal cruise this year, and he and I had this very, very strange conversation about it. I haven’t verified my facts yet, but I’m certain that the last cruise they went on (or one before last, in any case…in the recent past) was also through the Canal. But when I asked him why he was going on another Canal cruise, he said that they’d never done it before. Now, maybe they were just planning the Canal cruise when they last…when I was observing the irony last year, but I swear they’ve been there before. Does he really not remember? His memory is getting fuzzy. His whole personage is getting fuzzy, losing its edge. Anyway, so at brunch the other day, I asked him (it was just him and me together, with Burt) if he ever thought about the fact that Grandpa Bobo died on a Canal cruise (I’ve forgotten how I put it, but how would you interpret that?). And he answered the question thus-ish, “Well, I sometimes picture the scene, because Greta (his stepmother) told me what happened, but I only get so far into it, and then I sort of decide not to go any further.” In other words, he totally dodged the question that I thought I was asking – “Does taking this cruise ever make you think about you dying?” – and answered the question: “Does taking this cruise ever induce you to think about the scene of your dad dying?” Very hard to track what’s going on here, because obviously, I have some investment in the idea of my dad dying, just as he did in his dad dying. And I’d love to be able to talk to him about it, because I get the feeling that he’s scared.

Now I want to go write my screenplay. But I still have half an hour, fuck.

So I’m evading the issue. My dad dying. I’m afraid of what we will not get a chance to talk about, to say to each other. I think there will always be those things, for me. I don’t know if there are things that he wants to say to me but doesn’t, because he tends not to live much of his life in the unsaid, lurking part of his soul, whereas that’s my familiar territory. Persis and I joked that…the old folks home they’re moving into is called Cove River Estate…if I were to move into a home it should be called Dark Murky Swamp. Saturnine Swamp. Tenebrous Valley Hovel…I don’t know. Tenebrous. Did I use that correctly? I hope so. Otherwise I’ll be embarrassed. Must take a web pause….

YES!

Anyway, so there’s a lot I would like to say to my dad, but not much of it is light and cheery. Do you masturbate? How do you deal with the fact that you and your wife don’t have sex? Do you really have no libido? What….oof, here are some associations I must share, because they came up, but I’m not proud. What does your shit smell like? Can I watch you go to the bathroom…take a shit? (You know, I’m sure I’ve mentioned that my mom always used to show…not always, but on occasion at least…or allow us (me and my sister Laila, 2.5 yrs younger) to see her bowel movements, which we were really excited to see. And I remember once that my dad, we were in a bathroom in his office building and he was dumping in another stall, and I was in an different stall, and I knew that he was pooping (the sound, maybe?) and I asked if he could…if I could see it, and he said no. That has stuck with me…like, it’s one of my very early and clearest memories of my dad, when he told me I couldn’t see his BM. Bercedes-Menz. Why don’t I use the word BM, anymore? That’s what we always called it when I was a kid. BM. Now it sounds, quaint, embarrassing. BMW. BM is like, scientific, URT, CNS, UTI, PVT, BM. Like something you’d hear in a factory that builds people.)

Anyway,…

So what else would I ask him? How could you be so stupid as to marry that shrew? Are you really happy with her? No, I mean, REALLY? Let me tell you all of the things that I observe about you since you’ve been with her. You’ve become less discriminating. Less active. Less en…not less enthusiastic, but the things about which you are enthusiastic are so marshmellow-y [sic]. You listen to lame music, eat lame food, consume valueless culture, live in lame houses, and yet (I’m using lame a lot, like I did about myself in the first paragraph!) you smile. I remember you as someone energetic, discriminating, quick, smart. And now you’ve gotten lazy, like the skin under your chin. Is this just a part of getting older? Mom has gotten a little eccentric, but she hasn’t gotten soft in the same way you have. Do you really love Babs? Do you really value what she’s brought to your life, or are you rationalizing it just like I am rationalizing my relationship with Persis. There are moments of joy with Persis, moments of synergy. What do those feel like with Babs? You say you don’t fight, but I hear tension, sense it. It’s that tension, that desire to eject her that perhaps has made you numb, soft, seeking anodyne-ness. I hope I never turn in to you, and yet I see myself relentlessly turning in to you. But one thing I will never be is as obtuse about myself as you are. I hope never to become so out of touch with the scars and the pain in my life that I allow them to govern me as you have allowed yourself to be governed. Don’t you see that you have scarred yourself into a corner? It’s like that game Othello, where you turn over all those colored pieces. Scar tissue, building up, and instead of hacking away at it, renewing it, you let it build up. You never challenge it, and in your mind you are becoming cluttered with scar tissue so that the mental world you inhabit is very, very small. Why do you allow yourself, your wife to do this to you? You have turned into Babs, whose functionality is so limited. You guys are so boring to be around, unless I’m drunk. Do you think we will want to visit you in this place, where the dining room offering fresh waxed shiny Granny Smith Apples, and big bananas, and cheesecake cut in just-so pieces and set over ice in a buffet bar, where you look over the dining room as if over a huge raft of clouds, because the tablecloths are white, and all the hair is white. It looks like a shroud has descended upon that dining room. And as we were going into it, you said hi very brightly to an older woman who said hi back very brightly, and she whizzed by energetically with a bright yellow shirt, long-sleeved, and trim black slacks, and a tube connected to both nostrils, leading to another tube down her cheek and around to a sleek black pack on her back. “Hi! Good-bye! I’ll never see you again! Hope you go painlessly! Hope you die in your sleep! Good to see you!” I feel so sorry for him. And yet I have to live with him. How do I broach any of this with him and not hurt him badly? I try to reserve judgment because I know that Burt, God willing, will come to judge me when he is my age. And I only hope that he will be proud of the way I have chosen to live my life, even though, in all probability, it will not be the way he is living his life. I like the way my stepfather is living. I like the way my mom is living, though I would probably want to be more involved in my work. But how do I tell my Dad that I despise, pity the way he is living his life, and describe those feelings to him in all their detail? Of course, I can’t. Or I think I can’t. I talk to him every day, but this is all buried. I know he would claim to be interested in what I had to say, would tell Babs to get on [that is, to get on the phone while I told him], which would shut down the exchange to a degree. I would yell at him, “What are you thinking?! You are going to die, yes! But that doesn’t mean you have to go gently into that good night!” Dylan Thomas’s dad was on his deathbed, and he was imploring him to cling furiously to life. You are still young by many standards yet you are already digging your own grave, to go quietly, with little mess, leaving all stones unturned so as to leave them all in place, and so as not to leave unfulfilled any loose end that might be under the stone. Disgusting.

Deep breath.

Four minutes left.

I need some kind of confirmation that you get these. I think. I don’t know. I tried asking you for a return receipt on the email, but you haven’t sent one. I don’t know if you’re getting these, or reading them. You know, it’s a technology thing; what if they get dumped in your spam folder? It’s happened to me before. Could you just, maybe, confirm that you received it, so that I know that at least it’s not still floating out there? I’ve written weekly since the first post, and have sent either Sunday or Monday, but the last couple I don’t know if you got. Did you? On the other hand, maybe it’s useful for me to get used to not knowing whether you’ve read them or not, so that someday I can do the economical thing and separate from you and keep writing. I fantasize about continuing to write you weekly, never knowing if you’re reading them or not (not paying you anymore), and just fantasizing about maybe one day you open one up to see what’s going on. I get a lot of value out of writing these, whether or not you read them, but fear that, as with my screenplay, if I don’t know that there’s someone waiting for it, I won’t get off my ass and do it. I’ll see you on Friday, at…looking at Palm…10:30am.

Happy fourth of July. We purchased some fireworks, which are not illegal here like they are in Platte. My sister will be coming down to stay with us tomorrow, and we will light the fireworks in our cul-de-sac like we used to when we were kids. She’s staying with my father and stepmother this weekend; and it was made clear to us that Persis, Burt, and I weren’t expected to join them. Too much stimulation for Babs, I guess.

Distractions.

On Saturday I went to synagogue for the first time in a long time. There’s a Reconstructionist temple here, and I’m intent upon joining it. They offer “Tot Shabbats” on Friday evenings, so I will begin the indoctrination of my darling son ASAP. Since we decided not to circumcise him, I’m all the more determined to have him start at an early age being exposed to Judaism in a positive way. I hope that his experience through his Bar Mitzvah (God willing) is better than mine, and that he doesn’t have to go through the exile and return that I did, though that may have had just as much to do with who I was as it did with the particular program that I participated in.

It was nice to sit in the synagogue and feel myself in the presence of God…I use these high-flying phrases as if they really mean something. They do, only in the sense that they are trying to attain, achieve, whatever, some union with a signified that is a feeling. A feeling of …this is like trying to put into words the feeling that I got…get…when Burt says, “Hot.” It’s a feeling of one’s thoughts being heard by someone who cares and who can help, rather than just circulating around in one’s head aimlessly. I sat there, alone (last weekend, we tried to take Burt to Sat. morning services and decided that it was not happening any time in the near future, and that Persis would, in the future, watch Burt while I went. Persis doesn’t care for synagogue, or Judaism, all that much.), reflecting on how I feel like I’m in a place of similar helplessness as I was when I first starting going to Temple Israel years ago…I could try and pinpoint the number of years, but it would only take up time, and who really cares? I remember feeling at times as I sat there at Temple Israel that I was coming back to God, to Judaism, because I didn’t know where else to go. Therapy was helpful but not a cure-all, psychiatry was helpful but not a cure-all. And I know I’ve now written cure-all twice, but I don’t know that I’m really looking for that. I’m really looking, and was looking back then, for something that would take the pain of living away. Another phrase that I garnered from elsewhere that is more self-referential than anything. I say pain of living. I have heard of some book called, “When Living Hurts.” And that’s what I think of when I write that “pain of living” phrase. In other words, I am thinking of a title of a book that resonated for me as being an effective reference to a feeling that I have sometimes, rather than to the feeling itself. The pain of living that I refer to is a generalized sense of displeasure, moribund-ity (we are all moribund, aren’t we, but I mean more “bound for blackness, or mediocrity, or failure”), futility, lost promise. And I do things like the other day, when I received an anniversary card (Persis’s and my fourth anniversary was this week, on July 1) from my step-grandmother that wishes us enjoy or child and our house and all the exciting things in our life. And all I can think of is the irony of how all these supposedly exciting things in our life right now are all sources of frustration, sytmied-ness, and dissatisfaction for me. And then I wonder if that’s just the way life is, or if I’m really depressed again, and that my medications are again no longer working. Shouldn’t I be taking some joy in what’s going on around me, rather than being a total grouch at all times except when my Neurontin (mood-stabilizer, grumpiness remover, commonly referred to as my “happy pills”) is operative? I’ve become totally dependent on the medication in the sense that I am really no fun to live with (for myself or others) when I have not taken it. But increasingly I feel like the general tone of my mood is a fiery black. This is the distinction between what my depression felt like when it was first coming on and what it feels like these days. And I don’t know whether it is a product of some changed biochemistry, an effect of my medication, my imagination, circumstances…or whether it doesn’t really matter what the tone of my moods are, that thinking about this stuff is more than anything a product of my social class, since if I was poor I wouldn’t have the luxury of sitting for an hour every Sunday, writing to my $200-an–hour shrink, writing on spec a screenplay about the confrontation between pornography and abstinence, and being supported by my wife, pondering whether the tonal color of my mood was more deep blue or fiery black. But since I’m here, what I mean by fiery black is this hair-trigger tempered moroseness in which the world is pretty much irremediably uninteresting and unattractive, and anything anybody does (including me) to get in my way sets me off on a growling jag.

So I was sitting in synagogue and feeling that sense of tears coming to my eyes when I realize that I am not alone, and that there is someone who can listen to my troubles and understand them. This is sort of what I’m getting at when I talk about experiencing…or being in the presence of God. I also feel the same sense of deep submission to a will that is greater than mine because I know that my own will is insufficient to help me attain what I want. I find myself praying that the screenplay I am writing will not just molder in a drawer, because the fact that it is taking the time it is taking is deeply prejudicial to my self-esteem. I feel like a huge loser these days, cause I am creeping along, procrastinating as I write very little each day (enough to maintain progress, but not enough to finish as quickly as I want to, and especially not enough to endow my efforts with the urgency that I feel about them). (Please bear with me if my sentences here are getting a little sloppy; I’m not trying think about my feelings too much before I write them, so often I am stumbling over the words that I am using to best express what I am feeling. Syntax goes out the window.) The truth is that when I write, I alternate between short spurts of writing, and generally longer spurts of other stuff (bills, calls, etc.). And as much as I try to get rid of the other stuff, I find that it is necessary for me to maintain my focus on the writing. Like looking away from a bright light every so often, or something like that, in order to maintain focus. That’s a bad analogy…anyway, fill in the blank, I hope you know what I’m saying. And I have this thing about pacing myself: I often set tasks for the day that are stupidly small, then refuse to do more if I complete them, or pace the day (my “day” is four hours in the morning while Burt is at daycare) so that I finish them right about the time that my time is up. These are traits that I wish I could change, but I find that when I try to force myself to do so, it often impacts my self-esteem in bad ways, since I am often not using my concentration very effectively. And of course, I don’t get done the things that I need to get done in the course of the day, so inevitably I end up frustrated and pressured because other stuff is getting away from me, even as my writing is proceeding apace. I am very ashamed of this. And it’s one of those things that my oblique conversations with other writers suggests is not unusual. But there’s still the problem of kicking back and writing for four hours a day while my wife supports me. And there’s the issue of money. Certainly, after selling the Croesus house, we are not strictly lacking cash, but a bunch of that I want to save to invest, and I feel like…Persis and I are still worried that we will not be able to live within the bounds of her salary (88K) and the 50K that I’ve set aside for our living expenses this year. So that makes the writing thing, and all the more so with my lackadaisical attitude toward it, all the more of a folly.

And then there’s the depression, if that’s what it is. And it all amounts to my feeling helpless and wanting to submit myself to a higher power, something that is able to carry me through this hard time and out the other end transformed and successful. I think about other showbusiness families and how at this point in their lives they’re not necessarily set for life. There’s no reason that the fact that I’m struggling needs to mean that I am doomed to mediocrity and failure. I just pray that it doesn’t; and most of the time I feel like I can do nothing more than pray.

I feel like the time that I spent at Temple Israel years ago, praying for deliverance from the hard time that I was going through then, was helpful. Not necessarily that my prayers were answered, though it is very tempting to think this way (I’m amazed at…or not amazed, sometimes dismayed, as how attractive the abandonment of rationality is, and what a feat of will it is not to go there), but that it helped me ride out the bad wave.

Will I really never experience pride or glory again? Is my son the only thing I will ever be proud of from now on? Have I really ruined my life by having a kid? I feel like the idea that I’m working on is good, and that (in fact) I am writing better than I have ever written (procedure-wise, I mean; I mean, that my instrument is looser, like knees on skis, my instrument has eased up over time to more effectively handle the bumps), just not very fast or urgently.

I pause to observe that this was the first week of writing, these five days, one of which was essentially lost to house stuff. And I’m really giving myself a hard time for a brief window, and that last week when I wrote to you I hadn’t even started writing yet.

I wonder what reading these is like for you. Do you see themes come in like waves washing over earlier ones, mixing with them?

Anyway, so with seven minutes or so left, I am back to this feeling of needing help, and of wanting to recommit myself to weekly attendance of synagogue, both for me…for my sake and for Burt’s sake.

I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to continue with you. I hope it will be some time, but the issue came up as Persis and I were trying to budget out the year. I need to sit down and make a budget, but it’s hard still because of our change in circumstances, and having spent so much money recently trying to get the house set up, it’s hard to know what our spending patterns will be once we settle in. Though I guess the point of a budget is to estimate when spending should be, not just reflect what spending is, so what am I waiting for? I have to do our taxes this month, since we were in the middle of moving in April and I got an extension. And then there’s the real estate studying, which I’ve been able to do almost none of since I got here.

Babs I think has this idea that I’m actually aspiring to be a real estate agent. She thinks I have the talents necessary, but she’s also the one who once said to me, with a note of frustration in her voice (as if she were giving tough love – in fact, I secretly believe that this is what all of my family wants to say to me) that if the writing thing were going to happen it would have happened already. I hate her for that; perhaps also because I know that…believe that the rest of my family shares that feeling. I can tell in their voices when I talk to them about the writing. They are humoring me, hoping for the best, but not wanting to alienate me by saying that they don’t think I will have any success. That is perhaps another thing I am looking for in this thing I call the presence of God: someone I can have faith in to have faith in me. Someone who believes I can do it even when I myself do not. There is no one in this world who does…perhaps some of my friends, but I need support. And that is what I feel when I go to synagogue, that I am engaged in a struggle that is worthwhile and which I will emerge from having grown and grateful for the experience. Note that I am not insisting upon success, though I would of course not mind that. “Would it spoil some vast, eternal plan / If I were a wealthy man?”