Next week, I’ll be in Stockton for my cousin’s wedding, returning to Platte via Ecksville all day Sunday, which is my writing-to-you day; so since I’m seeing you at 5pm on Monday, I think I’ll skip the written session next week.

Persis. Burt. My “job.” I suppose I should take comfort in the fact that the things that are giving me tsuris are the same things that are giving tsuris to every other man of my age and class.

I want a wife who listens to what I have to say.

Taking care of kids is so boring. I feel like it wouldn’t be so bad if it were intellectually challenging. That’s actually been the theme of those times in my life that my “depression” has been out of control. (I say “depression” because part of me still believes that it’s all in my imagination, or a product of my will that is too weak to give myself a kick in the ass to look at the world more positively. I feel like maybe Tom Cruise is right and Brooke Shields is wrong. Or at least that he’s right about people like me. Perhaps I should become a Scientologist. Then again, perhaps Tom Cruise needs meds, too.) The theme has been that my brain has not been challenged, largely. I don’t know, maybe that’s not true.

(It’s just after 9am on a Sunday morning, and I’m not really into this.)

I’ve decided that I need to cut back on caffeine and sugar. I have so many chemicals running through my body. I’ve started to get regular heartburn, so now I’m taking OTC Zantac, or drinking baking soda dissolved in water, which isn’t good from a sodium perspective. So I’m thinking, less caffeine, less sugar, maybe cut out a few of my supplements for a while. Pare myself down to what I need. I feel like I don’t know what I need, and that would be useful information.

Hmmmmm.

I told you, I think, about the book I was reading, the religious fanatic antipornography book. It was amazingly helpful. After I wrote you last week and felt all but hopeless about my relationship with Persis, it gave me some strategies for calming the waters and healing our wounds. Which prompted me to thinking…(now do I want to spend my time with you going over the little insights that I had while reading this book?) Well, when I said that I wished I had a wife who listened to what I have to say, I was specifically referring to the moment this week that I backslid [In the sense that all of the strategies I had garnered from the antiporn book went out the window and I got unproductively furious at Persis.], having been able to have a healthier perspective on things (thanks to the book) until…well, I decided I was going to go out on a limb and actually try to share with Persis the things that I had been thinking about while reading this book on the treadmill (that’s where I do all of my reading these days). And the key insight, I think, came from a reflection on my part that many of the strategies that this holyroller book was suggesting were actually quite sage, and would have been what I would have expected from a good couples therapist, plus some religious vocabulary. And so it started me thinking about what, exactly, was the difference between, say, psychoanalysis and religion. And the answer, essentially, was strictly one of metaphor. Obviously, if one ascribes solidly to one or the other, it takes on the cast of truth. But essentially both are ways of describing the way the world works, and how the individual works, and how the individual interacts with the world. And as such, both are metaphors; they are systems for concretizing abstract properties (the unconscious is no more verifiable than God, after all [Or no more material, concrete.]) in such a way that the workings of the world become intelligible to the onlooker. They are metaphysical systems. And the war, really, that’s going on in our culture is largely one of metaphor, of metaphysics. It attaches itself to particular issues, as it must in order to be fought in any other than a rhetorical way; but the simple truth is that the real struggle is rhetorical, and I believe that we will not make any progress as a culture on this issue until the battle can be fought and understood as a battle of metaphor, metaphysics, rhetoric.

So then I started thinking about why a system of faith, based on a manmade text, accessible to and subscribed to by people of a wide range of intellectual capacities, should be able to reach in many cases the same truths as something as sophisticated and recondite as psychoanalysis. (Because let’s face it, people are truly healed by religion and religious experiences. The mechanism of that healing, the text of it, may be entirely different; but I think it’s safe to say that the endpoint or the goal is, essentially, the same.) And it occurred to me, reading this book in which a clearly intelligent (within limits) and articulate woman was parsing particular verses of the Bible in a meticulous way, that – and this is perhaps a bit obvious – the subscription to any metaphysical system requires faith. And in the case of this woman, the analytical energy she was putting into tracing her healing through verses of the Bible – not dissimilar to the analytical energy someone like me might put into understanding his past and present – was quite substantial. But ultimately, her method was just a means to the same end as mine. With one difference: hers explicitly embraced a relinquishing of control to God, ultimately achieved through her meticulous control of her own attention toward the text [In other words, the results of her analysis of the Bible justififed her abandonment of control to “Him.”]. Whereas I have no such philosophical justification for relinquishing control. My attention is instead diverted toward the actual living of my life…and it is clearly not working very well. Because this author seemed (for all of her trials) a good deal more content than I am. And so then I thought about certain skills like learning to walk, or ride a bike, skills which require a rehearsal and coordination of minute actions so that the performance of the larger action can be relinquished to the subconscious. And in many cases, after that point, when the conscious attention is again brought to the coordination of the minute actions, the overarching activity is more rather than less difficult than it is when it is performed automatically. So that struck me as an interesting parallel to my situation. And then I wondered if living one’s life was just such an activity, one that benefited from a lack of mindfulness. The problem being that as rational creatures (which rationality, after all, is an evolutionary adaptation) we cannot help but pay attention to things, and so we need a mechanism whereby we can justify relinquishing control over what otherwise would be a rational process. And so we come up with religion, faith. We see that we have dominion over the animal kingdom because of our brains, and yet we implicitly realize that our brains actually make more difficult many of the basic activities of living by virtue of our heightened consciousness, activities that animals without such consciousness presumably do not trouble themselves over. And so we must develop a system whereby, through our consciousness, our rational function, we may convincingly justify our suspension of consciousness, so as to make our lives easier to live. So ultimately religion develops as an evolutionary advantage by making those who are religious able to relegate more of their daily functioning to a subconscious level, freeing up the valuable space of consciousness for other, presumably also evolutionary advantageous activities.

Now…and I’m going to have to stop soon…I have no idea whether anybody’s thought these before. But they seemed to me like important and interesting ideas that I was excited about and that I wanted to share with someone close to me. But when I tried to share them with Persis, she first used them to go off on a tangent, feeling compelled to contribute her own ideas to the pile, and then, when I got angry at her for not listening to me (and she then criticized my family for liking to engage in extended monologues, uninterrupted, rather than interactive dialogues), she said that I was doing academic research without training or mentoring and with no idea whether anyone has ever thought these things before. And that pretty much sums up what I feel is the difference between her and me right now. I was trying to talk to her personally about ideas that were important to me personally, and she presumed that I was starting a mini-symposium, an academic exercise, to which she felt obligated to contribute. Some of this comes down to her regarding ideas right now as the province of work whereas I regard them as the province of leisure (this is also a personal difference between us), but it really made me feel again that I was with a cold woman, academic to the core, who really didn’t care about me or her family as much as she cared about her work and impressing people. Bitch.

Anyway, I’m over. I’m glad I got a chance to commit all that to paper, even if it was a waste of your time.

I feel that my ideas are a waste of people’s time.

Don’t know if I told you that I’ve been reading this book called An Affair of the Mind for research on my script. It’s published by Focus on the Fmily – the religious right org. – and it’s about “One Woman’s Struggle to Save Her Family from the Devastation of Pornography.” Mindblowing. It’s really affected me, not just in the desired way of getting a sense of who my abstinence character is. But it’s also made me think, lo and behold. And it’s my good fortune that this woman just goes off the deep end at a certain point, because there was a while where she was talking about how pornography affects marriages that I was starting to say, “Jeez, maybe she’s right. Maybe the reason I’m experiencing all these things she’s talking about (distance, numbness) in my marriage is because of my involvement with pornography.” But then, as I said, she goes off the deep end on porn and masturbation, so I was able to ignore whatever similarities my relationship presented to those she describes in her book. But what’s started—I mean, I should just say that the point of that last point was that I’m trying to attribute to something some undesireable aspects of my relationship with Persis, aspects which I’ve told you about, but which seem particulary problematic and trenchant…I mean entrenched…these days.

I’ve started a new medication…and this is not irrelevant either. I’m taking Wellbutrin. On top of my Effexor. On top of my Neurontin. And though my psychiatrist has told me that they don’t affect each other, and has not seemed fazed by the fact that I’m taking three psychoactive medications at the same time, all on a longterm (ostensibly) basis, I’m beginning to feel like a cripple, a headcase, someone whose hold on reality is not so strong. And that’s not necessarily because of how I feel – how I feel makes me think that I’m in a bad relationship with insufficient desire and less hope of getting out of it – but rather because of the simple fact that I’m taking all these medications. I feel handicapped.

So the book starts out with this long section on how this particular woman came to start communicating with God about her husband’s porn addiction, then the next section is about the devastation of porn and masturbation (sentences like, “There is a strong link between pornography and masturbation.” Like, what planet does this woman come from?), then the next section, which I’m on now, is about how to start communicating, yourself, with God. It’s a prayer instruction manual, complete with “Read the Bible” exhortations, and all that. (This book is remarkably literate for its stupidity…or articulate. It’s a classic of the genre, is what I’m trying to say. I think about doing a PhD in this: Christian hysteria literature. I’m not joking.) And what’s really struck me is how right this woman is about how actually talking to God does wonders. Now, I’m certainly not accepting her conception of God and prayer; though nor am I disavowing any conception of God – but what I’m feeling is that I need to do this. Because I realize that even the conscious flow of thought in my head is not at all what would come out if I could talk to myself, and that even writing or talking to you is not what would come out. I feel like I would say to myself some basic truths that I manage to avoid in my interior headspace, and my missives to you. (I will spare you for the moment my analysis of why what this women counsels her readers to do is similar to therapy. You probably know what I’d say anyway…)

What would I say to myself…?




I’m taking a moment to articulate it.





”You‘re having a really hard time.”


Hmmm. Not a great start.





“God. I want to pray to you but doing so feels so stupid. I feel like I’m above it. I’m smarter than that. That to even posit your existence by doing so is …stupid… lightheaded. And I feel resentful. I don’t like acknowledging that you might be powerful and specifically be more powerful than I am, because…and this gets into my own psychobaggage…we don’t have to get into that…but…it feels like a denial of my entire intellectual development to break down and pray. It’s just that at this point, I feel like it might be helpful. I’m feeling numb. I feel like I’m in a relationship that has no love. Some, maybe. And no real anti-love. But I don’t feel like I’m sharing a life with someone. At this point I feel like the two of us are bound mostly in our genuine love for our son, and the moments I feel most positively about her are when he reaches out to her. We are walled off from each other. And as much as I have allowed myself to feel that 1) I deserve what I have gotten myself into, or 2) that I am not stable enough psychologically to be able to sustain a warm loving relationship, or 3) that you have put me here because I can handle it and because I might be able to heal Persis…when I step back, I truly feel that it is her personality that has gotten us where we are. And I don’t say that lightly because I know how easy it would be for someone in my position to ascribe blame to the other party. I’m not without fault or participation, and I think the things that Persis complains about in me would haunt me in any relationship. But I think the essential lack of warmth and trust in our relationship is due not to what I bring to it but to what she does. Again, I say this with…I don’t know…it’s embarrassing, because I know that a psychologically blind person in my position would say the same thing, and I don’t think I am psychologically blind. I’m praying because I would like to have warmth and love and frankly some good sex in my life and I am at the bottom of the barrel in terms of hoping that my relationship with Persis will ever become that. I don’t see how it could happen, even in the best of cases. I mean, I can see us living together forever and, you know, enjoying each other. Not minding terribly. But that’s the best case: not minding. And I guess I’m praying because I don’t even know how to get there from here, let alone beyond it to…and I have also to confess that the relationship that I want in my life (warmth, love, good sex)…I don’t even want it with her anymore. I mean, if you were to tell me that it would come with her, okay fine, a long as there’s warmth and love and good sex, I’ll take it. But, as I said, I just don’t see that happening with her. And the thing that I have not been wanting to say is that I don’t think she will ever have that kind of relationship with anyone, that I believe she’s not capable of it currently, but that I am, and that I deserve it. Now this is not to say that she could not find a relationship that she’s happy in, and satisfied. I just don’t think that relationship for her would ever look like the one that I want. Which is not to say that she wouldn’t be happy having the kind of relationship I want… I don’t want to get caught up in the permutations of my thoughts…I want to tell you what I think, and not have to second guess myself all the time. The relationship that I want is not available here, and I believe I truly say that without a dose of anger or resentment toward her; it’s just an honest estimation of the differences between us. And I’m praying because I don’t know what to do about this, and I want to be open to solutions that are Good. And by that I mean not, like, biblically allowed. I mean natural, organic, and as benficial as possible for everyone involved. When my parents broke up, God, as you know, at least my understanding was that my dad did so largely out of anger at my mom’s affair. And as a result, I wonder whether he really considered what it would mean – and I mean considered in a thoughtful way, or realistic way, because as you know my chief complaint about my dad is that he’s a psychological numbskull – to me and Katie. I consider what such a solution would mean to Burt right now, and it breaks my heart. I feel like no freedom or satisfaction that I could get out of leaving this relationship right now is worth what it would do to him. I feel like that old adage, that old no-no “staying together for the sake of the children” is a conventional no-no in order to allow a lot of not sufficiently thoughtful people (I feel a twinge there of a lie, but it’s what I think sometimes) to justify leaving a relationship. Because the truth is that staying with Persis right now for Burt’s sake is a no-brainer. And my only problem is how to get to the not-minding place, if that’s where I’m meant right now to go. I don’t want to ever be away from Burt, as much as being his caregiver is sometimes numbing itself. I just don’t know what to do in the long run to make myself happy, because I’m also aware that condemning (that’s how I think of it) myself to this relationship for the rest of my life may as much as whatever supposed chemical imbalance I have contribute to my needing medication. I continue to believe that if I had a job I loved and a partner I loved that I could ditch the pills, though that may be a little overoptimistic…but three medications? I just don’t feel like that kind of person. I’m not that sick. The Effexor is my fault, but the Neurontin and the Wellbutrin are Persis’s. So I’m opening myself up to you to see myself and my situation and my options in a new way, some way that gives me hope of feeling alive rather than dead. I feel like I took a wrong turn somewhere, and I would very much like to believe that it is all for the best – Burt is certainly for the best, but something else would…some other reason would be nice, too – but I also want to believe that the present result of that wrong turn is not the best, and that there is something better wiating for me.”

So thank you for the space to do that. Now I go back to being the involuted, selfcritical, knowitall patient that has brought me to this point.




Sitting and thinking…





I’m feeling optimistic about the script at least…





It feels good to have been able to say all that simply and straightforwardly. It is a simpler feeling than I think I would have generally allowed myself to articulate, and that’s why this book has affected me in a good way…reminding me of the idea of talking to God, which is sometimes the only way I am able to say the simple truths. I distrust simple truths.

Not in the mood. Have a cold, symptoms held at bay by an antihistamine, but which has me feeling lethargic and dry.

The hours of the day from 2pm to about 6 are the worst. I can’t seem to get through them with any energy. Mornings are fine, but after Burt wakes up from his nap I’m just…I’d prefer to lie on my back and stare at the ceiling. I don’t know if it’s because I don’t like taking care of Burt, or because something’s wrong with me. In any case, I have a phone appointment with my psychiatrist on Tuesday, and I think I’m going to make some kind of medication change. It’s about time.

My mom and Bill’s mother are showing up tonight and staying until Wednesday evening. I’m a little wary about their being here, because the last time my mom was here I had some really not very good interactions with her, and I hesitate to think about how things will be without Bill to mitigate. I’m afraid she will try running away with Burt, and making me uncomfortable with the way she cares for him. And that if I say anything to her she will act out and start criticizing my parenting, which is what happened last time. The game will be to keep Persis working and away from everybody; it’s just as well. I don’t mind being with Burt as long as someone is helping me take care of him, and being with both Persis and my mom together is hell.

I want to continue talking about the stuff I ended on last week. I feel like I have missed my life, like I had all these opportunities [I’m talking sexually, here.] and did not take advantage of them, and then Joshua Yalom (shorter, cute, but not as goodlooking as I am I think, maybe I’m wrong) comes along and fucks both of these girls who – or two of them, because after all there are not just two missed opportunities – represented my—or not represented, but…I mean, my experiences with them pretty much typified my relationships in which I felt inept and scared to…whatever, kiss someone.

I glossed over last week one of the aspects of this that I am particularly ashamed of. The first year at Camp Chalutzim, there was this girl Amy who liked Joshua the year before, but who he didn’t like. And I was into her…that’s a misrepresentation, because the phrase “into her” implies some kind of sophistication, worldliness, when in fact I had none. And there were a number of things—I remember two in particular, well, one really—that I did that were, like…well, let me tell you. There was a camp out, and I maneuvered to be able to sleep next to her, and it was pretty clear at this point I think that…well, it’s so hard to gauge in retrospect, but anyone I think could have told the 11-year-old me that Amy was not “into me.” But my memory of this night is that the only thing I could think of to do…that the fact of my sleeping next to her, acting as if we were, like, a couple…that that was what I needed to do in order to make someone like me. I act the part, and they will magically come around. There was no sense of seduction, there was no…procedural knowledge of the things that I had to do in order to attract her. And again, this was the summer, I said, that I saw this guy – a bunkmate, so roughly my age – naked, who had a great deal of pubic hair…it was like seeing a man’s penis grafted onto a kid’s body…I was so shocked. I can’t believe that I was only eleven because everyone around me in retrospect feels like they were at least 18. I mean, this girl Amy was so worldly, experienced…I don’t know what the hell I saw in her, she was a real bitch. And I felt totally clueless. And the thing besides this camp out that sticks with me was that, when my dad came to pick me up at the end of the three-week session (the 21 days that shook my world; in retrospect it feels like it was at least a year), I wanted to introduce Amy to him, so I went to find her, and I did. And in the years that followed there were a couple of times that I saw her (I went to that camp the following two years, but I have no memories of Amy there, or in any case of feeling anything for her; one of these times I remember was at a Bar Mitzvah) she made fun of me for introducing her to my parent. And when I did it, on that dirt road between boys and girls camp, I don’t think I imagined that introducing her to him was likely to change her opinion of me, but there was something in me that wanted my dad to see the people who were significant to me that summer. But somehow, even then, as she embarrassedly shook his hand, she twisted my introducing her to him as something that was, again, acting as if we were a couple. I don’t know. In any case, this is one of the prototypical examples – in addition, of course, to the kissless lunch periods that had occurred that previous school year – of my ineptness, my cluelessness, my lack of savoir faire, which is I guess the same thing, of James Bondness…OH MY GOD!!! I just made a connection. That day that my dad picked me up…and I have always wondered why I remembered this so clearly…he picked me up and we went to a movie theater to see…a James Bond movie!!! I remember it as The Spy Who Loved Me. I’m going to check the release date….No, as I thought…that movie came out in 1977…must have been (sorry I’m spending so much time on IMDB) For Your Eyes Only. But anyway, I remember it as The Spy Who Loved Me. And James Bond films are all wrapped up with my dad – he liked them a lot – and I also remember I think coming out of the movie that we saw in Simi Valley having swallowed a hard cherry candy that was too big for my throat, and having that feeling where something is stuck in it but nothing is. It’s just a phantom of the cherry sour that left a scratch there or something. So I go from this experience in which I imagine I felt extremely inept and clueless to see a movie (with my dad, who left home a few years before, and who that January had gotten married to Peg…it’s weird though how, though I can verify when these things happened relative to each other based on their established chronology, the first year at Camp Chalutzim feels much more distant than the marriage)…this whole analysis (if I can call it that) brings up a lot of feelings about…1977: Star Wars. I remember – and this can’t be correct – my dad keeping me out of school to go see it with me. And thinking about The Spy Who Loved Me coming out the same year, which I loved when I first saw it (it was my first Bond film; I was seven that summer). And figuring that…I can never remember whether my dad left in 1977 or 1978. Anyway, there’s this sadness even to the happy sheen of these memories. A desire to stay in and endlessly experience the excitement of The Spy Who Loved Me rather than reemerge into a world that was less fun…hot and sad. But of course all of that may be interpolated by me after the fact.

But all my life I have wished that I had the seductiveness, the ease, the power and knowledge, of James Bond, and maybe it has something to do with these two opposites – me and him – being brought together at the same time.

I wish I could cry about this. Again, I feel like I’ve missed so many opportunities to have sex, and strangely that fills me with sadness, even though I know that many of those opportunities have been due not to my ineptitude but to my judgment: I’m talking about situations in which I could have had sex but elected not because of whatever reason – I was not ready, there was not enough time, I was respecting…I don’t know, I could pore through my memory and point out examples, but…I don’t know. I think that if I had been more skillful in matters of the flesh (if I didn’t need to, like a clod, ask a girl if I could kiss her before doing so; that has always really embarrassed me, and it has turned women off, in some cases, but again, I have this rationalization that, well, if they were going to be turned off by the simple lack of spontaneity, then they weren’t into me enough for it to be worth my time. That’s the other thing. When I berate myself for those missed opportunities, I’m not remembering the times I’ve had sex or sex lite (short of intercourse) and felt entirely sleazy because I was just doing it to do it, rather than because I was into the person inside the body. Not that there’s anything wrong with that; it’s just not as fun, eh?

I don’t know. I despair of ever again feeling that fluttery butterfly feeling of wanting someone and knowing she wants me and kissing her and knowing that we have all the time we need to slowly undress each other and have great sex.

I’m reading – for research purposes – this book called An Affair of the Mind, published by Focus on the Family (yes, the fundamentalist org.) about a woman’s selftold story of her husband’s addiction to pornography. Fascinating. Not, of course, a work of great literature, but definitely worth studying as one might study slave literature. Oddly, though, it’s making me look at my own attitude toward sex and how much it actually has in common with the abstinence perspective, insofar as I think sex that is anticipated and savored and delayed until past the first opportunity to have it is much, much more fun than sex freely engaged in simply because one can. And to that end, perhaps I can look at my missed opportunities not as failings of nerve or will on my part, but as failings of fate to bring the scenario I was implicitly trying to realize (sex delayed beyond the first opportunity of having it) to fruition. [It’s worth an ex post facto aside to point out that I’m having trouble accepting the fact (obvious from my experiences) that I just wasn’t ready to be physical at the time these things all happened; that if I had been, perhaps they would have turned out differently; but that, under the circumstances, perhaps instead of berating the 11-year-old me for being a sissy, clueless chickenshit, I should soothe him a little and tell him that it’s okay to wait, to not be ready, and that it is honorable and wise to not allow himself to be forced into doing something that he feels he is not ready for.]

Ding. That’s it.