I’m sick. Physically, I mean. I started feeling icky Friday night – aches, no fever – and it’s more or less continued since then, and now I feel this, like, profound malaise…it’s like this vague feeling emanating from my gut that just makes nothing particularly worth anticipating or even remembering fondly. This week Burt’s daycare is closed, so the bulk of the work is going to fall on me. Persis is trying to get me to let her make calls to babysitters, but I am resisting her, even though I am dreading a week of having to watch him, not work, and not exercise…which perhaps is a source of the malaise that I am not crediting. Why am I resisting her? Well, it’s a good question, and one I don’t particularly like the answer to…but I like less the idea that she is structuring my life for me. One might counter that since I am not structuring it for myself, that someone needs to – rrr, this makes me burn, the idea of someone saying it to me makes me burn more than the truth of it (and I even feel like admitting articulating the this so-called truth is just a dishonest pro forma hat off to the contrary truth with which therapy often rewards the effort that it takes its rhetorical possibility [The strikethroughs and what follows them are an after-the-fact effort to correct a mangled attempt at expressing this idea. Same goes for the rest.], rather than actually a genuine acknowledgment of the state of things) – but…why am I not doing anything about it?

I want to make her suffer.

I want to make, give Persis a difficult time, make this week hell for her to get her back for all the times she has tried to control me and my life; to make her feel the lack of control over her life and mine that is the very thing that all of her overbearing efforts are trying intended to avoid keep at bay; to make her feel the rage at me that I feel toward her for being the kind of person that she is. I am resisting her simply to spite her, when the truth is that I will make myself miserable as well as her; but somehow that is worth the possibility that my showing her how I feel by making her experience it (that is, preventing her from feeling by denying her the ease that she has prevented me from feeling denied me by not paying attention to my needs, not being the person I would like her to be), even though all the other times I have tried to make her learn by subjective example have been abject failures, and instead of easing tensions between us have merely created a climate of hostility and mistrust…but anything, I suppose, to avoid having to write.

I am especially frustrated at this prospect (though not enough to allow Persis to take proactive steps toward alleviating my frustration) because I feel like I could be turning a corner in terms of working out the story. [That is, the story of my script.] I feel like I have the characters mapped out, or just simply recognized, discerned, better than I have before. Though I don’t know why having that feeling this time should be any different than the other times I’ve had it; invariably it always proves to be a smokescreen for the abyss that in fact awaits me around the corner. [It is with great pain that I forbear from correcting the mixed metaphor. You get the idea.]

I have taken a break [From writing this entry, that is.] to try and look back to where I was two months ago when I got to Ecksville – I was afraid that, in fact, I hadn’t gotten very far, but I was surprised to learn that I have come what seems like a good stretch, confirming that the work gets done, even if not rapidly. But there are times that I still wonder if I will get done by the end of the school year, which I have managed to adopt as a deadline (‘managed’ because I know I talked about not being able to make myself a deadline with teeth, but I think I’ve conceived of this as sufficiently reasonable and doable that to not meet it would not make a lot of sense and seriously call for some kind of path adjustment).

I seem to be avoiding the stuff on my relationship with Persis that I managed to put down.

I should tell you that I am a little high.

I am afraid that you will disapprove, even though we have talked about this possibility before, and you even once upon a time sounded distinctly interested in that idea (I mean only in the tone in which you asked me about my thoughts about it). But at least now, by the time you’re reading about this, you won’t be able to make me feel guilty about it by your response…

Which actually goes to the very heart of the reason why this format is ultimately not workable…because it short-circuits the transference entirely, doesn’t it, if the patient is able to use the fact of the nonpresence of the therapist in order to avoid its consequences its formation entirely. I mean, who I imagine you to be, what I imagine you to think becomes of little value…no, I mean of little power, if I am able to extract its stinger simply by saying, “Oh well, he’s not here.” Those sentences were very hard for me to write because I imagine that you will think I am out of my depth, stonedly philosophizing about something I know nothing about.
But then I think that, wait a sec, if I were not stoned, I don’t know that I would have even dared to make that observation (which after all is potentially important: my recognizing that a crucial aspect of what has been important to me over the last few months is rendering it less useful than it once was) because I would have allowed my fear of what you would think of me to win out. But when I am stoned, as I have always maintained, my defenses are down, so that thoughts that would have otherwise provoked a much stronger repression reaction ([thoughts] such as how self-destructively and irrationally I am behaving in my relationship with Persis) are instead allowed to surface. And I am instead able to experience the emotion (self-hatred) the avoidance of which ordinarily provokes the repression that repression is ordinarily recruited to avoid.

Self-hatred. And I want to wrap this into what I was talking about last week, because I acknowledged, shortly after writing you, how mercilessly I have been hating the young me who was afraid to kiss a girl. And somehow, instead of being able to comfort that part of me by acknowledging and understanding him/it, my hatred has instead perhaps made him/it persist…because the hatred of it is a…the action of hating it enables me to alienate it from the current me, to deny that it is a part of me still… Or maybe I am hating it because I know that it is still a part of me…anyway, this is pointless whatever. The bottom line is that I have been going through my life with the wounds of these two experiences (one of which I was not able to finish telling you about, nor [about] its implications for [my relationship to] competition… hold on, one thing at a time.

So—with a mere ten minutes left—I am trying to observe that being stoned facilitates the exploration of feelings that I might not otherwise be able to get to as easily. [Rereading this with a clearer head, I wonder if that’s true, and I also wonder whether my estimation of the importance of these ideas was exaggerated. But perhaps this skepticism is itself is a pawn of my repression.]

I mean, all three of these topics (Persis, non-presence, can’t-kiss) are huge. And now I don’t have enough time to talk about any one of them.

But last week, quickly. The other thing that happened (in addition to the girl who I couldn’t kiss during lunch) was at camp two summers later. There was a girl I was…well, we were sort of together…no, we were together (how to define ‘together’ back then is murky)…we were an item. And long story short, I could never get up the guts to touch her, let alone kiss her…and to this day I think this girl was one of the most attractive I have ever been “together” with…and ultimately she ditched me because of that. Because I wouldn’t kiss her. Couldn’t kiss her. And the summer before, actually, at the same camp, there was a girl who had a crush on my friend Joshua but who didn’t like me, but who I really liked, and I kept doing these things that were trying to make her like me (oh God this makes me feel ashamed…I wish I had another hour)…I didn’t know how to do the things that other people seemed to know how to do to, like, get girls. Come to think of it, this is a summer that…I remember seeing a guy my age with pubic hair for the first time…it freaked the shit out of me…and stream of consciousness here because I’m running out of time…Joshua, my friend from camp, who the girl Amy who didn’t like me liked, and Lutece, the girl I was afraid to kiss but wanted to so badly, Joshua, my friend, years later—well, it couldn’t have been that many years later—by the end of high school, he had fucked both of them, and he told me about this without any consciousness of how deeply both of those things hurt me. And I feel like if only I was more savvy, had the metaphorical pubic hair, I would have been able to make Amy like me and get up the guts to kiss Lutece, and maybe I would have been able to get them, to sleep with them. It was Joshua who first introduced me to pornography. And is it any wonder that the dialectics of abstinence and pornography are forming the backbone of my script? This is truly something that I have never really acknowledged the power of in my life. How much it still controls me. Time’s up. Fuck.

Things settling down, except that my back is really hurting these days and I’m writing to you from a supine position, my legs up on the arms of an armchair in my office. There’s a tennis ball under my sacrum, which has become my new favorite hobby: lying around my office with (or other rooms of the house) with a tennis ball under various parts of my back. It’s the most amazing focused massage I’ve ever had. Sometimes I prefer it to trying to read while watching Burt. I can just lie there and target various aching areas of my back and feel like newish until the next morning, when it all starts over again. I’m not entirely sure whether it’s that I'm carrying Burt so much, or if it’s that I’m sleeping in a bad position. One other thing, this is very good for my typing, which I’ve never really learned to do without looking at the keys, except that in order for me to do so, I have to crane my neck up – the front edge of the laptop is on my waist (the front of my waist) and it’s resting back on my just shy of vertical legs, the top sticking out roughly parallel to the floor. I can see what I’m typing well enough, but can’t really see my fingers. Problem is that if I do crane my head up to look…it’s not very comfortable. Hurts my neck. I could try putting a book or something underneath, but that ends up tightening the muscles in my neck eventually, which is kind of beside the point. I may not be able to maintain this position the whole time. Oh, what do you care? I’m just getting old, I guess.

My dad, speaking of getting old, came to visit this week, two days before he got the keys to his new place at the old folks’ home – Saturnine Swamp, Lugubrium Lane (have the back of my neck draped over a wine bottle now, not bad so far). The visit was okay. I kind of gently challenged him on the Cove River Estate thing, saying that (and it was one of these comments that just sort of came out of the blue, as if it really wasn’t apropos of anything), “I don’t know about this retirement community.” And I have this fantasy that when I say something like that, that he will open up to me and say, “Yeah, I’m a little ambivalent about it, too, but it means a lot to Babs and I think it will be good for us in the long run.” At least that would let me know that he was aware of what people might (and by people I mean his immediate family) be saying about the move. What he did instead was launch into a fairly monovalent defense of the decision (not a defense in the military sense – he was not being defensive, he was justifying it, quietly). It is those moments that I seriously doubt his insight and thoughtfulness, when he seems like just a rolypoly oaf twiddling his life away.

He never really solicits my thoughts. It’s odd because I’m always expecting him to just say what he thinks, and he often takes a backseat and just listens unless I specifically solicit --- ooh, this is getting into some interesting associations: I hope I can keep up with them --- his input. And then whenever Laila or I get angry at him for not being more involved, he just says that it’s our life and that if he has something important to say he’ll say it, but that most of all he just likes watching us live our lives and aside from those important things, he says…expects, takes the position that if we want his advice we can ask for it. Strange, revealing that he appears to take this position relative to our thoughts about his life: that if he wants our opinions he’ll ask for them. All together, taken as a whole, it just seems like he’s evolved these “dadlike” philosophies of relating to people – his children, in this case – that more or less justify a position of noninvolvement. And it’s the kind of thing that feels like the justification is merely subsequent to the behavioral inclination – that is, he is justifying for his own cognitive consonance what he is instinctively inclined to do anyway. And the association I had was with my come-on to women. I am always very polite. Very considerate, wanting to make sure that there is consent and attraction every step of the way. Specifically, and this is a little embarrassing, I tend not to proceed unless I get encouraging feedback from the start; the first whiff of noninterest or hardtogetness I disappear, reasoning that if she isn’t into me enough to show me then I don’t want to waste my time. Similarly, with sex, – and this is I think what goes to the heart of the matter. Always shy about moving in for the first kiss (I could tell you stories about me when I was growing up, probably have told you them, but I want to get to the end of my association chain first), I have frequently asked the woman if I could kiss her. And sometimes it comes off better than others even if she does say yes, but I can’t really say that it’s ever suave – or rarely so, I mean, one could write a scene in which it might be suave but of course things rarely work out that way. And sometimes, I’m convinced that it has actually killed the moment for the woman, girl, whatever…and this I justify by saying that, well, if she’s not into me enough to want to kiss me and mature enough to be able to name that desire, well then I don’t want anything to do with her. But the truth of the matter is that that is a philosophical justification for the timidity that I cannot seem to shake (and that I secretly think has made me end up with a woman who is not comfortable expressing desire at all, strangely – that doesn’t really make sense on its face, but I still want to get to the end of this chain of thought before…maybe this is the wrong way to proceed. Oh well.) Anyway, so there you have it again: this philosophical justification for one’s behavior that is in fact subsequent to the behavior itself, which the individual feels powerless (or is not willing) to change.

And this lack of finesse with the ladies makes me think of this episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm I saw last night (I hope you‘ve watched it; it’s so fucking funny), which episode turns on the main character, Larry David, being at a pool party thrown by a business associate. And he sees the 8-year-old son of this associate naked while changing by the pool, and this 8-year-old has a huge penis. And the fact of this penis comes to ripple through the episode. But it made me think about Burt’s penis, its shape, its uncircumsizedess [You’ll note that I have consistently and unintentionally misspelled ‘circumcise’ as ‘circumsize.’ The mistake is perhaps understandable given the pronunciation, but it nonetheless substitutes the idea of ‘size’ in place of ‘cise,’ which refers to the ‘to cut’ root. The substitution accentuates, don’t you think, my anxiety that, being not cut (lacking ‘cise’), his penis is larger and nobler than mine (possessing ‘size’)?], and there are times when I feel a certain anxiety about his penis being somehow better than mine – bigger in relationship to his bodysize, nobler in that it is uncircumsized…(I really have come to appreciate the noble stature of the uncircumsized penis; it’s like a knight in armor with his hood: complete.) And Burt’s endlessly cheery disposition (well not endless) and his ability to rein…not rein, but that’s what I wrote…reel in the ladies (the parapraxis is interesting; to what extent is my feeling unable to attract an anxiety about not being able to control these women, my mother…hmmm…my wife?)…makes me feel that he’s going to be more successful in love than I have been, which on the one hand would make me happy, but on the other hand would rip open these longstanding feelings of inadequacy again. [I note that I have left unexplored the issue of my feelings of competitiveness toward Burt, which must at some point be discussed of course since I have spoke recently about how disturbed I am about my inability to contain my feelings of competitiveness. Here, however, it appears I have conveniently sidestepped them in order to focus on my feelings of inadequacy with women. It may very well be that my focusing on my own inadequacy avoids the more troublesome issue of my feelings of competition. In thinking about this as I write after the fact, this appears to be the case, since each of the episodes I discuss below (or start to discuss) at the end of this session, carries with it an associated memory of someone else being able to do what I did not (but since I am not making this connection until just now, you will not find those associated memories described this time). This is big stuff for a footnote, but I suppose it will have to wait until next week.] Will I ever rid myself of them? My fantasies about having affairs are really, or at least in large part, about proving to the world that, in fact, I can attract a woman in circumstances other than the most open and shut cases.

But back to the other question of why, if it has been so important for me to have the woman I am pursuing at least meet me halfway, I have ended up with a woman who seems to be incapable of doing that? Of course, she is very…what…headstrong, motivated, controlling…in other ways. I don’t think she’s been timid about showing me her desire to be in a relationship with me, but sex…which is what all of this inadequacy on my part revolves around…she can’t, or doesn’t. And it has felt to me like this is my just desserts: since I was never man enough to learn to deal with women as the suave commanding yet genteel figure I would like to be (remember that my ideal in this arena is James Bond) I have been sentenced to forever being denied the one thing that I have falsely made it my philosophical position that I must have in order to make a move on a woman. I say it as if God has condemned me, but of course it is really I who have condemned me, I who have been so derisive, dismissive, hateful, critical of what I have termed my inability that I have condemned myself to the clutches of a woman who will not give it to me [That is, give me what I want.]: “Because you cannot go for it, you shall never have it again.” A little oversimplified, perhaps, but that’s how it feels.
Ugh.

That doesn’t speak very well of my relationship with Persis. So what should I do, huh?


Now there was something else I evaded talking about a little earlier. Let me check back…

Oh, stories when I was growing up…God, my first effort at trying to kiss a girl was an abysmal failure, and I’m almost sure I told you about this. And now I’m talking about real kisses, with romantic intentions. Molly and Claire liked me and Joshua. They asked us to meet them out on the field at lunch because they had to tell us something. They went to whisper in our ears, but they give us…now I’m only concerned with Molly, who was my fifth-grade sweetie, she kissed me quickly, staccato, on the ear, and ran off. And I went after her, I think, went to find her, and wanted to kiss her back. And I remember sitting with her, through many a lunch period, on a sheltered bench near the classroom, she sitting and I standing next to her, talking, waiting for the guts to rise within me to kiss her. And the thing is, we both knew that that was why we were there: it was my turn to kiss her. We would actually make plans to go back to this bench during lunch so that I could go back to waiting for the guts to kiss her. And I don’t know over what period of time this lasted, but I have expanded it in my mind to, like, cover the whole year. As if I stood there on many a lunch period during the whole year, waiting for the guts to kiss her, she knowing that was what we were waiting for, she also patiently waiting for me to get up the guts to do even just what she did staccato on my ear, but [I] never actually getting up said guts. I have hated myself for that ever since. And I wish I could say it was the last time. But I had an even more devastating experience, like,…let me see…summer of ’81 it must have been, which would have made it not the summer following my hopeless lunch dalliances (which were during the school year ’79-’80), but the following one. A year and a half later. I …

Time is up. I want to continue… I could but… Do I need to respect the bounds of the session when you are not even here? I think I should.

I don’t like having to tell you that I’m postponing sitting down. It’s something that I don’t just do with you. I hate telling people that I’m late, that I’ve chosen to postpone, blah blah blah. Anyway, thought of dropping you a note, but here we are.

I had to watch Burt through this interminable barbecue this evening that was for incoming students and faculty. It wasn’t interminable until it was over, and by that I mean that while it wasn’t exactly the most exciting thing I’ve ever undergone, it wasn’t really an unbearable imposition until after I had a chance to come down off it and get pissed at Persis for having left me with Burt while she kibbitzed with her co-faculty, whom she’s trying to impress so that they’ll vote her a position for next year. She tries to impress upon me that it’s for this reason that she has to be collegial and spend the time to schmooze, but that is all lost on me. By the time she’s explaining it to me I’m just thinking about how I wasted three hours and fifteen minutes of my life that I could have used for some purpose other than following around Burt and passing the time with the very attractive mother of the son of one of Persis’s colleagues. She’s, like, our age; a very simply beautiful asian woman, Ivy League educated…God,…no, a poor context for the invocation of God…but I was going to say, Gadzooks, it would be nice to be in bed with her. A funny fantasy: she and I rearing our children while our spouses vie for jobs and tenure, ending up (she and I) together in the sack. Not an original idea, to say the least; but an interesting spin insofar as I’m the stayathome dad and she’s not a stayathome mom…she works for the -----’s Office in Capitol City, so no slouch. I’m the slouch.

Perhaps that’s what this comes down to, yet again. (By the way, I’ve been feeling better this week, as we’ve been inching toward a degree of structure to our days, some predictability, and I have integrated an hour on the elliptical trainer into my four hours of work. The great thing is that the elliptical trainer turns out to be a great place on which to solve thorny story problems, by talking out loud to myself and trying to coach myself through whatever narrative blockage I’m suffering.) It comes down to the fact that until I get a writing job, or decide finally to move on and go to law school (there was this young woman who had come into Persis’s office just before I showed up with Burt to go to this insufferable barbecue, and this woman was lamenting her academic fate, not sure whether she should go to law school or get a poli-sci degree. I could have sat her down and told her a thing or two about frittering one’s life away trying to decide what one really wanted to do and that a law degree was a fine place from which to launch a career; as good certainly as a political science degree which probably would have left her knowing a lot about a particular area, but without…aw, now I’m just bullshitting…anyway, I was comparing myself to her and thinking that if I ever decided to go to law school, I would know exactly why I was going and wouldn’t be wasting my time on the day before the first day of classes wondering if I had made the right decision. I suppose you could say, though, that – if I were to go to law school – I had spent fifteen years before the first day of classes, wondering if I had made the right decision), I will feel like a slouch. (You’ll have to go back as I did and find the first open parenthesis.) What’s new?

Anyway, I hope my story is coming along. I feel like it is. It feels like it gets clearer every day, though every day brings a new wall to climb over on the elliptical trainer. I would tell you about it, but…I thought about telling you about it. But…

It’s about this adult film star, a woman, who finds herself living through a period of …what I mean to say is that…

USA. Not to distant future. The government has cracked down on porn stars and prostitutes and the like as terrorists under the idea that such evildoers reduce the collective will, or the individual will, to fight terrorism. Our heroine finds herself the victim of a crackdown, and she flees with her son (who does not know what she does for a living) to Utah, to the home of her former lover (and, as we eventually discover, the accidental father of her son) who was and is a devout Christian and who is now, as luck would have it, married to the Senator (also a woman) who was responsible for pushing through the legislation that made the prosecution of sex industry workers a crime under the…whatchamacallit…Terrorist Act…you know…the Patriot Act. Anyway, (and the story of how this devout Christian found himself in bed with a future porn star is itself a subject of flashbacks (I’ll let you lick your chops)) as it turns out, the Senator did not know about her husband's past with the future porn star, and as you might imagine, she [Senator] is as eager to keep it under wraps as the porn star is to keep herself out of prison and her son from knowing the truth about her. So the porn star and her son end up being ensconced in the basement of ex-lover and Senator’s house, with strict instructions not to have any contact with their two children, one of whom is older than the porn star's son (from the Senator’s previous marriage) and a ne’er-do-well, and the other of whom is younger (we’re talking, say, 11, 9, and 7; something like that). So the cops are still looking for the porn star, they are on her trail, and when it comes down to it, the porn star and the Senator find themselves in league to ward off the impinging outside world in order to protect their careers and their families, and through this experience of a shared goal each comes to appreciate each other’s humanity and so to see through the stereotypes that have made each hate the other. Something like that. Not bad, eh? I’m a little lightheaded here, from a couple of beers and a shot or so of some horrid Chinese liquor which is the only thing harder than beer or wine that I have around since I finished that deep bottle of gin a couple of weeks ago and haven’t yet had time to make it to…what’s it called…Costco for a refill. You can’t buy liquor here (in Oregon) at supermarkets, and I haven’t felt desperate enough to make it a point to find a liquor store prior to making it to Costco. That said I think I’m drinking less on the whole than I was before I left.

My f…

Wait. So I’m feeling pretty good about the prospect of this story. I think it’s timely. The characters are potentially engaging, and assuming I can make them sound honest and not preachy, I think the ideas are attractive. But it’s taking so fucking long.

Anyway, my feelings toward drugs are starting to thaw a bit. Staring to feel a little less unbalanced, tense; a little more on top of my world and able to tolerate a little unpredictability. Maybe it’s time, maybe it’s exercise, maybe it’s structure. Who knows.

Not feeling much strongly right now. I forgot to make time on Sunday again, which puts me in the 10-11:30pm range for writing you…not the most mentally alert or energetic of times. In fact, since I’ve already done all the things that take up the bulk of the evening after Burt goes to bed (laundry, garbage, medicating our dying cat), I’m feeling pretty relieved and relaxed, and instead of complaining about what I’ll just have to experience against first hand tomorrow, I’d rather be surfing the web, watching a DVD, polishing off the remaining piles in my office.

That said,…now I forgot what I was going to say.



Yawn.



I find myself looking forward to hearing more about what you find in terms of psychoanalysts up here. Even while I feel less strongly the need to…it’s like the first couple of months here I have felt a pressing need to maintain my connection with you in particular. Perhaps it’s because I anticipated or at least was expressing a need for continuity amidst change. Now I don’t have that same need for continuity…but at the same time and by the same token I don’t feel as dire a need for therapy…which is not to say that I don’t still want to see someone…only that I don’t feel that it’s really really important in the same way that I did when I first was contemplating moving and then when we actually went through with it. I suppose that’s to be expected. Blah blah blah. I still want to see someone here, and the prospect of analysis, time and money permitting is still very attractive to me.

I don’t have it so bad.

Nine minutes left. Pardon me while I make an effort to drudge up whatever it is I feel like I’m trying to suppress.







I miss my Platte friends. I can’t really see myself living fulltime in Platte again. I really like Ecksville. But I still like my friends.

I do feel a little cut off – not so much lonely, because I sort of thrive on that. The only thing that makes that all not matter is this idea that I’m trying to get this script done and so don’t really have much time for a social life.

I feel like I’m making sacrifices for my…gulp…art, which is good because I have often felt like I was not making any sacrifices, and that I must if I was to make anything good.

I’m starting to be able to see my story as one of an uphill battle rather than a downhill slide. Although that doesn’t change the fact of the battle.

I don’t know if I’m actually getting out more. Since I started the elliptical trainer every weekday, I’ve been feeling a lot less kempt up, even though the machine lives here at home.

I could tell you some nice things about my life here, but it hardly seems worth it when I could use the time to complain some more. Little adventures with Burt. Friends in the neighborhood.


My eyes loose focus…


Persis is resisting my efforts to get out more. She was not encouraging about my gym plans, for reasons of money and childcare. As it turns out, I found a compromise that seems to be working, but who the fuck is she to tell me that I shouldn’t join a gym. I went looking at a few earlier this week…or last week.


Running down the clock.

The idea of you playing basketball. Discomfort. How does someone as soft-spoken as you hold his own on the court?

What ever made me think I could write? I feel like…so betrayed by myself. That I could have cornered myself into such a fool’s errand as trying to write a successful screenplay. Why couldn’t I have just had a burning desire to follow in my father’s footsteps and be a lawyer? My mind – I opine – is far more incisive than his, far more suited to…what?…de…? What’s the word I’m looking for?…what they do to frogs in high school…you know where they cut them up and look at the insides…killing it in order to make it an object of…dissect. My mind is much more suited to the dissection of legal, moral issues. I think about things more, am more critical, and embrace that critical-ness, rather than shunning it, as my dad has learned to do under the tenure of his new wife. It all comes back to him, doesn’t it? A feeling that he betrayed me by leaving and by planting the seed of my anger and resentment and hatred such that I turned my back on everything connected with him, even though it might have made my life much easier (and possibly even happier) had I learned earlier to turn my back instead on the resentment and hatred, accept who he was, is, and what he did, as being the mark of flaws in his character, and not something that made me have to hate him, shun everything he stood for. Why could I not just learn from him as one might learn from any flawed character…Moses for example? One can both admire him, follow him, and yet learn from his mistakes, his headstrongness, his reliance…I'm getting a little too selfconscious now. But my examples are interesting, no? The thing is…I love my dad. When I talk with him, he’s just this nice guy whom I love and who loves me, and yet my internal experience of him is something entirely different. And if he were to read this, I imagine he would be hurt, yes, but amazed, uncomprehending, how he, with all of his good intentions, and his honor, and his having made what he must have thought was a decision that was best…for whom?…for him certainly (I’m talking about the divorce now)…but I imagine him standing in the face of this big decision – to stay or go – and taking a sober look at it and deciding that it was an awful decision to have to make but that he would make the right one no matter the cost, because the cost of making the wrong one would be greater. It’s interesting to think of him in relationship to his father, a judge, who many people active in the Platte legal community still ask me about and ooh and aah about. Not a very nice man, I’m told (he died when I was five), but he made a landmark decision in a desegregation case that effectively ended his judicial career. He was subject to voter approval, and he handed down his decision just before the filing deadline for running against him, knowing (or he must have known, that’s how the story goes) that the decision would spark controversy, opposition, and likely, his ejection from office. A difficult decision that he decided to make in the correct, honorable way, no matter the cost to himself. Whereas my dad…?…what was the cost to himself? He made this decision for himself. He can’t have thought it was best for his kids, could he have? Maybe it was. I mean, maybe everything they say about kids growing up in a marriage that lacks love is true. On the other hand, maybe that’s just a line that’s used to justify the rising divorce rates. What actually happens when parents who would otherwise split stay together for the sake of the children? You must know that. I want to know.

If only I could anneal [Not the right word, as it turns out. But I imagine my ambition is a sharp piece of glass that is heated so that the edges melt, soften, become rounded. Like sea glass. Perhaps that is what will happen when my soul finally encounters land and is washed up on shore.] my ambition so that going to law school…not that that has to signal the end of my ambition… What is it that keeps me from giving up writing? What does writing mean to me?

I want to create a world. Want to make something that people look at and admire as a complete and coherent vision and say, “Ah. That. That was made by Joel Geller.” And it will live after me when I die. I want to do something that uses my skills. And I have skills as a writer. I know that. I just can’t seem to put them together in a way that utilizes them. What can I do that is most suited to me? Screenwriting is very hard. Is that a surprise? No. But is it this hard for people who do it for a living? I’m in a stage of the process that’s very scary – Act II of the screenplay – that’s akin to the…throwing a ball…or juggling. What am I trying to say? Act II is about keeping the balls in the air, and it’s where a good deal of the inventiveness of writing comes in. The beginning and the end are easier because there isn’t really anything to maintain…why do you need to know all this?…I’m trying to demonstrate to you that I know what I’m doing, that I’ve become the writer that it’s easier to say that I am. I have to psych myself up and tell myself that I can do this before I sit down, rather than looking at the task and getting instantly discouraged by it. That’s what I do. I woke up this morning and thought about what I needed to do workwise today and my initial feeling was, “I’m failing. I’m embarking today on work that I know will be bad, that will not work, and the only reason I’m doing it is because I have to because I’ve told everybody I know that I’m writing. But I’m just going through the motions. This will not work, the path (storywise) I am going down. I can never make it work. I am not good enough. Someone who was good at screenwriting could do it, but I am not, so I cannot, and I am merely delaying the moment at which I am forced to acknowledge my ultimate failure and go to law school.”

I’m so jealous of Persis and her colleagues, teaching, professing expertise. Though I hate the way Persis talks about feeling good at what she does. She does it always with this “fuck you” behind it, this challenge, this sense of indignation. Like she’s sticking it to me that she’s hot shit. And it’s not personal, I think; I think she would express herself this way to anyone. But it’s always how she’s expressed herself to me when she’s feeling good; as if her feeling good precludes anyone else feeling good in the world, trumps it. As if she’s talking to her mom or dad and saying, “See, you thought I couldn’t do it, but I can. Fuck you.”

I long to be able to feel good about what I do again, like I did when I was editing. I don’t feel good about writing, I don’t feel good about daddying. I love Burt, love holding him, but then I want to give him away. I love it when he’s at daycare, and hate it when he comes home and I have to invent an afternoon for him. It’s almost the same hatred of invention that I have when I’m writing; I just want it to write itself. I hate taking this big leap into what might happen. Like going with Burt somewhere. I don’t like driving with him. But I don’t like to be out in the sun. We can’t go anywhere that demands attention; the only place that’s good to go is somewhere he can have constant stimulation. Sometimes, I just want to go to an empty park and sit and let him run around. But he requires supervision. Oh, I’m such a fucking broken record.

The session with my psychiatrist was okay. Arrived late and felt very guilty that he saw me through a cancellation he had the next half hour. Thought he didn’t like me because of that. Decided not to change medication yet, to wait another month, month and a half and see how I do. Sometimes I feel this burning physical sense, a burning at the base of my solar plexus (no, not heartburn), an anxiety that my world is desperately in trouble, that I am useless, and am lightyears away from fixing that. I feel in the middle of a very large ocean, spiritually. No land, nothing secure in sight, and no idea when I will see anything. It was good to articulate to you, to Dr. Weiskopf, to my parents that night (got high, as I said I would, and it made me feel relaxed and expansive, and I was really able to talk to them, which I think they appreciated, and was very helpful to me). Came home with a clearer sense of what was going on with me…but it doesn’t make what’s going on no longer go on, that’s the problem.

Do you know what I’m talking about? This burning, buzzing anxiety. It’s like a constant sense of butterflies in one’s tummy, but it’s not butterflies, it’s maggots. My soul is decaying, decayed.



I want to take something for this anxiety, but mostly I want to cause it to disappear, that’s the problem. That’s ultimately why I’m shying away from pot most of the time, because I know that what I want the pot to do it cannot. I want it to take me away, to change my circumstances. And I know that all it can give me is a moment’s relief, and in doing so, may make it actually less likely (or slow me down) to take action to ameliorate the conditions that are making we want a quick fix. But what’s frustrating is…and this is the middle of the ocean thing…all of those actions are so long term. Law school, screenplay, real estate. Can’t I just win the lottery, so I won’t have Persis fretting about money anymore?

I’m really afraid that I’m not going to be able to finish this screenplay. And it’s such a workable idea. So that will be the ultimate sign of my failure: being handed a good idea and not being able to make anything of it.

What else?

Our cats aren’t healthy, and now it’s falling to me to give them antibiotics, and fluids, and ointments, and special foods. I wish I could just shoot them.

I feel like I have so much to prove to anybody who has ever doubted me. And yet – it’s like Persis’s tone when she says she’s feeling good about her work – the fact is that none of them care what happens to me. But I want to make them care. I want them to be surprised at how far I’ve come, and how they’ve underestimated me.





Long pause. Sip of coffee.




I feel like ending early. I want to go tackle the writing. I want to tell myself I can do it and launch into it and tackle it. I want to get through my outline and start writing from the beginning again. A finished first draft – a contradiction in terms.




Long pause. Sip of coffee.







There’s stuff I’m not wanting to get into. Feelings about Persis. Feeling that I like her but don’t think we should have dated, or gotten married. Somehow I regarded all these quirks about her as challenges…like I would experience something about her and say to myself, “This is something that would scare most people off, or turn them off; but because I’m special, more insightful than most people, I’m not going to let this thing turn me off. I’m going to stay with it and see where it goes.” But of course, that can be said of anything. And any frustration that results from those quirks that others might recognize as potentially troublesome I regard as frustration to be tolerated. And I’ve already talked about how I think my frustration tolerance is too high. I wish I could give up sooner, because I think it would be good for my self-esteem. I could become a lawyer. Could go out there and find someone who really would make me happy, rather than constantly embattled.

My mom told me this weekend about the angry, dysphoric streak that runs in the men of her side of the family. My grandfather, my uncle. So maybe all this looking to circumstantial causes, while interesting, is ultimately fruitless. Maybe I would just be angry and grumpy all the time with whomever my partner was. Anna was always afraid of my anger. Burt laughs at it, which I like. But I feel like Persis… At some point along the road, I made the decision that I would not let myself be walked on by her, and…I don’t know if you watch Desperate Housewives, but the Marcia Cross character has a lot of Persis in her, as does Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter series. I don’t want to be married to either of them.

I mean, there are moments where I genuinely appreciate her (though I’m not very good at letting her know), but even at its best these days, my relationship with her is one of pleasant convenience and temporary alliance (always with the hope of permanence). I’m not particularly attracted to her. Sometimes there’s a flash. But I look forward to the day when I can conveniently, discreetly make love with someone who’ll really make me feel sexy and wanted. She’s very talented. And I appreciate and respect those talents. But we’re really just co-managers of our family.

Bell sounded, gotta go.