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?