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.