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.