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.