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.