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.