I’m thirsty. I just went to yoga this morning for the first time in, like, a year and a half; kicked out the door by my nagging wife who, in this case, has spurred me on to do something that I really needed to do. Left to my own devices, I would have hemmed and hawed and puttered around doing the NYT crossword puzzle, to which I’m now addicted, Wednesday thru Sunday. Anyway, I just wanted to say, for the record, and for everybody out there who’s now reading this (because, let’s be honest, that has to enter my mind; I’m sorry but it’s true, and maybe that’s another reason to stop this: because it’s become infected by the bug of public performance which, as I worried about last week, I hope doesn’t make what I say less honest. I’ll still be writing to you. But it does bring in…like…and I know I’m still in a parenthesis here…bear with me…it…in the case of Persis, I’ve been going back and reading all of the other posts, some of which I like quite a lot, and all of which are overwhelmingly harsh about Persis, and I picture…this is getting very dicey here…but since I’m writing to you – Herr Doktor Goldberg – I must confess…I picture my friend Onyx, one of the people to whom I’ve entrusted the website address – which is by the way…uh, I’ve forgotten. I’ll give it to you later…I picture Onyx reading what I wrote and feeling sorry for me because of…well…no…I’m having a lot of trouble here, because all of a sudden I’m talking about my relationship with someone who might one day be reading this, and focusing on her eyes rather than yours.

Let me refocus this, because I don’t think this is going down a very productive path…and yet the path I was going down was precisely a path that I fear I will no longer be able to explore – that is, relationships with friends who may be reading this blog – because I will no longer be talking about relationships in the space of therapy, but rather will essentially be telling my friends exactly what I think about them…and the sad truth is that I don’t know if I want to be that honest. I don’t want Persis, for example, to read this blog; she doesn’t know that I’ve started to post. And the fact that I know she is not reading now allows me to be honest about what I write about her. But should a…

Is this boring you…is this too meta and tangential for you; maybe I’m wasting your time. But I’m concerned about this, because I am starting to feel the limits of the honesty I will be able to provide in my blog. I feel like…are you familiar with Gödel’s…what the hell is it…in this book, Gödel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Douglas Hofstader goes thought this long and brilliant explication of Gödel’s Incompleteness theorem?…is that it?…and it basically comes down to proving that any system of logic, supposedly complete and self-contained, can produce statements that cannot be…what?…proved or disproved using the…anyway, the bottom line is I’m starting to bootstrap my way out of this sacred space of writing to you, and maybe what I’m saying above all is that I will miss you. I will miss knowing that you and only you are reading. I will miss the safety of your eyes and nobody else’s. I will miss the feeling that I can be completely me, and that I will instead be thrown back into my world of relationships in which I must hide, pretend, obfuscate, lie, and basically fear the status of relationships should I be honest.

I am thinking now about my friend Onyx, whom am I feeling compelled to…describe my relationship with…but now it is not for you. It is for her. And it is a compulsion that has to do with proving to those who are reading that I am in fact being totally honest and open. “Totally honest and open.” That’s starting to take on the cast of a naïve myth; one that I hold up as an ideal, but which is actually predicated on the nonparticipation of my interlocutor in the relationship, i.e. said interlocutor is a therapist, essentially, or a dead person. No offense. The truth is that…and I’m feeling like what I’m saying is rather tendentious here…did I use the right word? Oh shit. Just a sec…

Fuck, no, what word am I thinking of…not ‘pretentious,’ but, like, pithy and pseudoenlightened…anyway, Joel the Wise says, “The truth, my son, is that no one is ever what you in your innocence have called, ‘totally open and honest;’ for each of us constructs anew our relationship…or ourselves, rather…(does Joel the Wise have to correct himself?)…we construct ourselves anew with each relationship, and while certainly there is a lot that we bring…

Oh this is bullshit. I’m…

I’m wasting your time.

What I really want to say again is that I will miss writing to you. And even though I will try to pretend that you will be reading, it will not be the same. For who will I be writing for? My journal entries when I was in teens and twenties were for me, and as a result they took on a different cast again. I was…I don’t know…in a way, that’s really when I’m most honest…and open…stomach churn…because I kind of put aside those pretension…SENTENTIOUS!…let me double check…

YES!

Anyway, I put aside the pretension of trying to sound smart and literate. I get beyond, or do not arise to the point of – in my discourse – having to let the “listener” know that I have foreseen all possible objections to anything I have to say and will further display the agility of my mind by addressing those very objections before they even arise. I allow myself to sound stupid [This is in my journal entries to myself, remember.] and innocent and ordinary…like someone who does not necessarily process and pad what he says with every sentence. I am…this is really bringing up some fear in me, and I would like to try and figure out what it is… Who is it that I am afraid of sounding like?…associations…my dad…this guy…I participated in a panel discussion that was done by this organization that offers seminars for women on relationships and sex. And this particular panel was a group of men…this is something that the organization does at the end…or toward the end…of the seminar…of this particular seminar…anyway, three or four men are invited to come and they are given a stack of written questions and they are supposed to answer the good ones…they take turns, sitting up there in panel format (I’m sure I described this to you when it happened), and they answer honestly and openly…because they don’t know the women they’re talking to…(there’s the shadow of that phrase again)…and at the first one I participated in, the last question that the seminar leader put to us was, “Do you have anything else that you think we should know?” And I said, because I was actually surprised that no one in the room had asked this…the questions and answers were quite explicit, so it would not have been out of character…no one had asked about anal play. And I said, as something that I thought they should know, that it could be…I don’t remember what I said, but it was positive…“look into this” was the gist of it. And one of the other guys on the panel, about my age, who had adopted this kind of aggressive, sort of full of himself, confident of his expertise, this fucking guy, he sort of chimed in…and as I recall he was not called on or anything, so it was a totally superfluous remark as I remember it…he said something like, “Well that makes one of us.” Though I hardly think he was as witty as that. Basically he distanced himself from that…from my gentle suggestions…which I was kind of embarrassed to offer because I was afraid that the group would be able to see my effeminacy on my sleeve…or whatever…but he said as I remember in this sort of puffed chest manner that that was not something he was interested in, and while I can understand presenting that point of view as a caution to women against going there with a guy whose sensibilities were unknown, I basically thought he was a real hick fuck for saying that. And why did I go to him when I was thinking of who I am afraid I would become if I were to lose my incessant analysis and commentary on my own thoughts…my pretension toward insightfulness and literacy…I would become someone who could say, without a dose of…THIS IS IMPORTANT…WITHOUT A DOSE OF SELFCONSCIOUSNESS OR CRITICALITY (is that a word?) THAT HE WAS WILLING TO CUT OFF AN ENTIRE CATEGORY OF EXPERIENCE FOR WHAT I IMAGINED…IMAGINE WERE UNCONSCIOUS REASONS. So I am afraid of being someone who blinds himself to the underlying truths or feelings about what he is saying by no longer caring about what the dee--...what his own deeper truths are. Because the whole point of writing is not principally to articulate truth but to find one’s way toward it, and how can one do that without turning back on oneself and examining what he is saying and processing that as if he were an outsider. [I should add that, while this experience with that panelist who needed a good assfucking is something I reflect back on, one thing I was thinking about bringing up today was that Burt sat for a prolonged period on the toilet for the first time today, trying to poop. And as he was pushing, really pushing, and I was kneeling before him excited that he actually might just squeeze one out, I started, as a consequence of my excitement, to get an erection. But as soon as I became conscious of the fact that my penis was stirring in this most unusual of circumstances, it settled back down. Repression in action, I suppose.]

But this still isn’t getting at something I’m afraid of…something that I’m really having trouble articulating. Okay, like I’m afraid of saying something…maybe it’s just PC phobia at heart…but I’m afraid of saying something sexist or racist or classist without being able to simultaneously identify that statement as _____-ist and to examine my motives for saying that thing. That if I were to lose the involution of my perspective, I would…I would actually be sexist or racist or classist in the eyes of whomever was reading. (But this isn’t just a reading thing; this has to do with how I conduct myself in the world every day.) And I am afraid of being labeled and dismissed by someone as these things; I am afraid that someone so labeling me will think I am just another whatever no smarter than the next person, and not worth listening to. And my voice will not be heard because it will be tuned out, seen as ordinary…

Yes, this is all true, but…there’s something more basic…





I almost see it as a physical posture instead of a way of speaking. And what characterizes the posture is pure expression without reflection, and that…I am afraid if I let myself be that racist classist and sexist person (because that would be me)…that I would never be able to go back and be the more introspective and sensitive person that I would like to see myself as. That I will lose myself…like when you told me that you liked my writing last time I came to see you (BTW, I’m trying to arrange a trip to Platte mid Dec. so we can meet once more. I’ll let you know, or check dates with you…). When you said that, I noticed that my chest puffed out and I became proud to be me and I stopped thinking about, qualifying, being hesitant about much of what I said to you subsequently about writing, certainly during that session, but also since then to a varying degree (not my screenplay; that I still feel incompetent about). I became a person I don’t want to be, and…but why don’t I want to be that proud person, who is able to represent his point of view and not feel ashamed of it?

Because I feel like that person is only half a person. That person became the happy pig instead of the suffering Socrates, and I like being the suffering Socrates.



Hmm. Maybe that’s it. I’m afraid I will actually be able to be happy and free, and I don’t want to ever be those things. And proud. [It occurs to me afterward that a simpler answer to that question posed immediately above is that it is because I am not proud of my point of view.]

That’s a bit of a dark spin, but…something to think about.

Anyway, started out by saying or trying to say that I appreciated my wife this morning, and that I was glad I was married to her.

But of course, it’s hard to say that without qualifications…heh heh.

And I’m afraid my friend Onyx for whom I have had very complicated feelings over the course of our relationship (which will come as no surprise to her, I’m sure) will feel sorry for me and my unhappiness in…and I don’t say this to…well, maybe I do…in a relationship to which she introduced me. Ugh. There it is. Huh. Anyway, I’ll move on.

Reinhardt has me…asked me if I would be comfortable lying on her couch, my head looking…I’m sure you know the posture…she’s behind me, so I talk and can hear her but not see her. I told her you never did that; that you were always more present and at least physically engaged. Amazing. I’m describing you as engaged. I wish I could know…pick your brain about how you came to be the therapist that you are, could have you teach me, take me under your wing, create a way for us to be together in the absence of this epistolary relationship that is coming to a close.

I’ll give you a call about the visit.

[Bracketed italics are after the fact.]

I want to make a change. I’ve started blogging, since I haven’t been back to Platte yet to talk with you about it. I thought about it for a long time, talked about it, or at least brought it up with Reinhardt, and now I’ve started posting the…what?…sessions I’ve sent you, in order, and I’m up to the beginning of August, I think. Anyway, doing that, even if nobody sees them, has made me reevaluate what I’m doing this for – and the downside of that of course is that I stray from what makes them honest. It’s that old thing [or old for me; it’s something that I have felt for a long time but have never shared with anyone, as far as I know] about humans being very bad at knowing why what they do well is good, and trying to reproduce it with a heightened consciousness of their intention to reproduce what they’ve already done somehow rarely works. [I‘m not expressing myself very well. It takes a great deal of forbearance not to edit.] Anyway, I’m going to talk more about my feelings about the blogging here, but suffice it to say that I really want to look at not writing these pieces to you anymore… That sounded so harsh…I never could have said that to your face. And I want to amplify what I mean. I actually want to continue writing to you, but I don’t want you to have to read them. I see it like this – and I think I’ve articulated this scenario before – I post once a week a “session” written to you – and I am hoping that I will be able to preserve the honesty that I am able to bring to these pieces; that’s what I think makes them worth reading…anyway, the change will be that I don’t send them to you, and you don’t have to read them. I will give you the address of the blog, and you can access it any time you want. But I guess the upshot is that I don’t know if I want to be on the clock for the time you spend reading these. This is perhaps abrupt from your perspective, because I’ve been doing a lot of processing, or at least have had this issue in my mind and have been, I don’t know, wrestling with it. Let me start a new paragraph and I’ll try and tell you more about my thinking.

I don’t know if anyone will ever read these things on the blog. I am not telling any of my family (Persis included) that – and I really should interject here that I am changing all names and places so that any specifics will be unrecognizable; I owe that to the people I love whom I happen to disparage with great liber…liberality?…in any case, I have renamed you Goldberg, I hope you don’t mind…is that too Jewish for you? And I have renamed my wife Persis, another unusual name, Biblical as it turns out, and was the name of the eminently fuckable assistant who worked with All Hands. I should insert an aside here about how much I wanted to…I mean the lust I felt...I really wanted to experience the way her body…what the fuck am I trying to say?…I wanted to fuck her, yes, but it was more poetic than that…to know the feeling of what it would be like to…and I’m about to engage in some talk that I’m now wondering if it’s just for an audience…anyway…the [desire to know the] feeling of my cock being inside her was just this giant…like…ball of fire in the air. Of course…or not of course, but as it happened, I never got the opportunity…no, not even that, I actually… There was this one moment (and call me vain, but I think she kind of…well, let’s just say that my fulfilling my fantasy might not have been…might not have made her vomit were it suggested to her at some point during that year)…ugh, I’m just, like…so starved for sex, no? And it’s not even that I’m particularly horny right now, but the feelings I had for this woman were…luscious. [I should add here that this name substitution was not made because of my desire for echt-Persis, at least not consciously; ‘Persis’ simply struck me as a good match for my wife’s unusual name.] Anyway, my birthday, about four months into the season, you know they always do the surprise cake blah blah blah, and she was the one carrying it, and I was called outside of my office on a lark…or not a lark, but a…what? A false pretense, and everyone said surprise, and she was holding the cake with the candles on it and I put my hands up…and you know how people hold cakes: picture a supplicant, hands out…or arms out, hands, palms upturned, as if trying to reason emphatically [or beseechingly] with someone. Anyway, and I put my arms up to take it from her…and I swear to God. Our fingers touched. And it seemed to me that it was not accidental on her part. Yes, call me stupid, vain, wishful thinking, whatever, but it was like I felt her finger touch mine…and I fuckin’, like, jumped. I don’t know if anyone else saw it, but I was amazed at my reaction – it was…what…the mathematical term I’m trying to think of…commensurate with my desire for her, my, like, reaction electrically to get away from that. Because…and I hate to say this because it sounds so…what?…typical…I’m having a really hard time thinking of the words I want to say tonight. Anyway, I want to be faithful…and I use that word as one of those echoey indicators that I’ve talked about hating before…those words that mean far more than they actually purport to and so become almost, in their simple manifest content, a denial of all the other stuff that lies beneath the surface…anyway, I say faithful not because I accept that word uncritically, but because I am trying to tell you a story so stop fucking interrupting me because I just want you to know what I’m talking about! Anyway, I have this desire to be faithful to Persis. I want to be a good husband. Like everything I do, I want to do it right. And…it’s like Hope (Persis’s mother, who was in town yesterday) asked me…or I was talking with her about the reason that I spend so much time with Burt, and I was telling her that I had this desire to just really do the having-a-kid thing the “right” way, the “hardcore” way, so that I would be able to say in later years that I had done it. And it’s the same thing with being “faithful,” let’s say monogamous, because I think that refers more to a behavior, a phenomenon, than a system of values. And I have the desire to be monogamous so that years down the road I can say that I was and be proud of it. It would be like a badge that I would wear. I got my monogamy badge. Yeah, who the fuck cares? I mean of what real value is that? I wonder if you have been faithful to your wife. I imagine that you have…from the confident way that you wear your wedding ring, unselfconscious and almost…I don’t know…I know I’m rambling all over the place, but isn’t that what this is for? [I seem to be feeling some hostility toward you.] (Maybe I want to take back what I said in the beginning…I‘m sort of getting back into this, and I wonder…whether, I don’t think that just cutting it off is the right answer…but before I continue on I just want to say that I do want to move concretely in that direction, and I don’t know how best to address that with you, since I don’t know if I will get to Platte before the winter holidays, at which point you may well be on vacation. Perhaps I will call you, to initiate some kind of vocal interchange so that this might be resolved with your input, because I do want that, or your feedback, and my writing to you for your eyes and having this rule that you do not respond does not really lend itself to working together to change our relationship…anyway…looking back to see where I was…)

So I have this desire to be monogamous, to get my monogamy badge, at the same time having this sinking sense that no one is really going to care, and like I am starting to feel about the entertainment industry, the system of values in which that is prized is not necessarily one that I ultimately subscribe to. I’m not trying to make a case for sleeping around; that’s too easy. I’m really trying to engage the reasons that I want to be monogamous and to critically examine my reasons for wanting that, whether or not it would be objectively (if such a judgment could be made) beneficial for my relationship for me to do so. Certainly, I think that it would be beneficial. Persis is asking me all the time…or at least not infrequently whether I’m having an affair. She does it not confrontationally, not threateningly, but just on occasion when the subject of a conversation veers toward that area, she might just unobtrusively throw the question in. And I do kind of resent it. (It reminds me of the first phone call that she and I had after I took this rafting trip back in…1999…and I don’t know why she thought that I was likely to…or intending to sleep with anyone…I guess the subject had come up and I didn’t adequately swear to her that I wouldn’t nor that I would tell her if I did, for the sole reason (because I certainly had no intention of doing so) [This last parenthetical is a white lie. I had definitely fantasized about doing just that. But I didn’t know exactly who was going to be on the trip (though I presumed that I would know people because it was arranged by a friend of mine), and I had no concrete plan to follow through on my fantasies.] that to be asked to make such a promise seemed to be not part of the relationship that I wanted to have. So I guess I wouldn’t make that promise…I wouldn’t say, “I promise you that I will not sleep with anyone.” (Persis (as I imagine you have surmised) was not going on this trip.) Anyway, so when I got off the river after a week and called her, like, the first thing she said…asked me was, in a confrontational and not at all loving way, “Have you been with anybody?” [Just those hackneyed words. Her tone was accusatory, as if she were bracing herself for a blow she knew would come.] Now – and I told the people I went on the trip with (I wish I had time to recreate that whole episode because it is incredibly significant in my feelings about Persis…this is the kind of thing that I am able to do with Reinhardt, for which I am grateful, and another reason why I think I should start creating a little bit of separation between you and me, as we talked about in our last meeting.) Anyway, when I told my river companions about it at dinner a couple of hours later (I was alone in my hotel room when I called Persis) this silence descended on the table that made me think: 1) that I was not wrong in being very angry at her [Persis] for doing that (and I must have brought this up with you when we met afterward); and 2) that I was embarrassed for continuing to see her, and that the consensus at the table would have been, “Ditch the bitch.” Reinhardt, by the way, I think…no she doesn’t, she hasn’t appeared yet [in the blog] and has no pseudonym therefore…but my psychiatrist is Weiskopf, so don’t feel so alone in your semitic apellido (I just used the spanish word because that’s what came to mind)…anyway,…

I could not believe that she (Persis) did that. And that is one of those moments that I look back on and say, “I should have ended it there, while I had the chance,”…

Now there are a lot of loose ends above…I should throw in that after my electric jump under the cake…and make no mistake that it was a jump away (I mean, this is all happening in the context of a concealed gesture, again, no one…well maybe they could see me jump slightly, but they wouldn’t have known what it was about, but I maintain that echt-Persis definitely did know what it was about, and after that episode, to my great dismay, she got the message that I didn’t want to send [i.e., that I wasn’t interested, or that I wasn’t about to…ugh, this word…cheat] and kept a little bit of distance (not in a standoffish way), but I really think that that one little touch and my premature (because I fantasize all the time about keeping my finger there, and caressing hers while the company went on singing happy birthday to me. They didn’t know it, but the cake itself was icing on the cake that they were really presenting me with, if you follow what I’m saying here.)…

So loose ends. But the theme is emerging. I try this abrupt breakup with you…not a breakup really, because I didn’t say I never wanted to communicate with you, but what came out as I was typing was (in my estimation) rather abrupt, certainly more so (as I said) than it would have been had I been in your office. A fantasy about sleeping with someone named Persis, whom I…whose name I have given to my wife in my altered reality on the blog.

Persis and I aren’t really getting along that badly. We are almost always sleeping in separate rooms. I sleep with Burt in the main bedroom and she goes (always with a good excuse) to the guest bedroom and sleeps there. She always talks about wanting to come back…and I believe she is sincere when she says it…but I think (in her case for totally sleep-related reasons) that she doesn’t really, [and that she] dreads the day when it’s finally beyond her to excuse herself from the master bedroom. But here’s the thing that I’m not telling you in the above: I don’t ever want to her to come back. I would like her to sleep in that guest bedroom forever, because sleeping with her is really not fun. And I’m not talking about sex here. I’m talking about all of her sleep sensitivities; I have to sleep in a certain position because otherwise apparently I snore too loudly for her; and she really hogs the bed, and Burt is between us, so I’m relegated to this narrow lane in which I have to sleep on…is it my right side?…my stomach?…I don’t know. She knows, and she makes to sure to tell me…or makes sure to make sure that I’m in that position. And if I snore in the night she pokes me to get me to change position, and sometimes I just can’t help it. (BTW one of the least favorite qualities of Persis’s is the way she wakes me up when I’m sleeping. My mom would come and lay a hand gently on me, rub me gently so as to awake me gently, and I would awake to her loving face looking down at me and her caress on my arm or leg. And even if I didn’t want to get up, I knew that she was doing it out of love…or with love, anyway. Persis pokes me. Say I fall asleep when I’m putting Burt to sleep. Persis comes and pokes me to wake me up. Poke poke poke. And not playfully either. If she were to flick me awake…flick flick flick…it would be the same.) Anyway, I do not like sleeping in the same bed with her, and the funny thing is that I think we both feel the same way about sleeping with each other, but are hesitant…no, not hesitant, we could never say that to each other…well, I could never say to her, “You know I don’t want to sleep with you anymore, and I think we should just face the fact that we like sleeping in separate rooms better,” because that would precipitate a crisis in her mind about whether she was being a good wife or our marriage was working blah blah blah. And she of course would never say the same thing to me for the same reason. (Bell rang, let me just finish up.) I wish I could say that to her: “Let’s just sleep in separate rooms.” Then I could cuddle with Burt alone and have him all to myself, the one person whom I’m able to lavish love on and feel like it’s received, even if he resists it sometimes.

Boy this didn’t wind up being about what I thought it would be.

Good night.

11/07, no, 6/05.

I am a failure. As of today. Not that I wasn’t a failure yesterday. It‘s just that with every new day I become a failure all over again; it isn’t like something that, you know, you become and then it’s just sort of…your identity, I mean…sticks to you and gets dull and gray with time. Every day is a new affirmation of everything that I could have been and am not. A new exposure of my incompetence, my impotence to that world, which goes on about its way, uncaring that it is leaving me behind (not that it should care; why should it care about the miserable fate of but one of its cling-ons), but also without pity, without…it doesn’t waste, or expend, a moment’s thought about the fact that I could have been on top of it, but somehow got snagged in something and ended up beneath it, trampled, flattened, and squashed by it; a nobody now, every day another different nobody.

Let’s talk about my writing. I say ‘my’ as if I ever had anything like writing to claim. I don’t mean writing like the kind I do; the kind I do…well, I would say ‘well,’ but it doesn’t really rise – that style of writing that is – to the level of a craft…or…evaluateable activity that one can do poorly or well…the kind I do one simply does. [I am trying to refer to the writing that you are reading.] Anyway, so I do not meant that ‘writing,’ in the mechanical sense. I mean the kind of writing that actually aspires to be something, that has form and function. And not even that the form that I’m aspiring to…the screenplay…is so majestic. But at least it’s a form, it’s out there to be conformed to. But I can’t do it.

Anyway, let’s talk about that writing, and I suppose to be useful here, I should pull myself out of the muck that I am rolling around in, as if I were a pig that knew it was going to be slaughtered…although that analogy isn’t good, because the pig probably likes the muck, whereas…let’s say…aw fuck this…

This is extremely self-indulgent, even if it is…what?…authentic? Whatever. So perhaps I will stop this and try to share my problem with you from a less emotional and a more analytical perspective.

So…here goes.

I can’t write.






How was that?

Now let me explain a little. I am imagining my writing process as the reverse of dissolving, like, a square of rice chex cereal in milk. NO!!!

Goddammit, I just want to be straight with this, and here I am being cutesy.

The truth is…or rather the simple fact that I am trying to get cross is that I am afraid I really cannot do the thing that I am trying to do. I am beginning to think that talent is something that is doled out (and I am tempted to analogize again, to compare working with one’s gifts as swimming in a river, and working against one’s gifts being swimming upstream) in unpredictable but de…and unknowable, even…but nonetheless definite portions. And the talent that I am trying to develop, the talent of writing in this specific form is not one that I was given.

This isn’t working. I keep coming back to the general inability whereas what I really want to explain is the specific experience that I force myself to undergo each day.

I do not currently know how my story is going to end, and so I am engaged in the process of trying to come up with an ending. But it’s not just, like, okay, let’s have it end this way. It’s envisioning the specific pieces that will lead up to that ending. And as it turns out, at least for me, this is not just something you can slap on. The ending, ultimately, must be generated from character, from the dramatic forces that the confrontation between characters and their respective needs unleash. And I’ve gotten…somehow, miraculously, it feels, to a point where I feel like I have generated characters who will bounce off each other, and I’ve gotten them to all get together, but then I get very confused and scared. I am so torn between the dramatic necessity of what happens and the role of invention in the writer’s process – and by torn I mean that…you can see how these are contradictory forces: necessity, or determination, on the one hand, and invention, which is a creative compensation for a lack, necessity’s child, as the saying goes. And I find myself at a junction in the story where I must invent something that must feel necessary. But there is a wide range of necessary. You can certainly point to movies in which the need is more manifest and urgent than others. Two films are running through my head right now – Chinatown and You Can Count on Me – which aren’t necessarily the best… Let’s take Die Hard, not necessarily a buoy on the sea of culture (this expression I got from the teacher…the seminar leader of my english class freshman year at Yale, where he was holding up Ulysses and referring to it that way, as a buoy, etc. And I don’t know why I have clung to that buoy, so to speak; but I have a hunch that it is because I have always hoped someday to be able to float my own), but certainly a classic of the genre, or at least a very good example of it. One could say that the needs in that film are extremely exigent; that’s part of what makes it an action/adventure film, the pressingness of the needs that the characters are undergoing, and the height of the stakes (which is really just another way of saying the same thing). Whereas You Can Count on Me, which to my mind is a great film, a great screenplay in any case, the needs, or what happens, isn’t as urgent, but it arises, again, out of character. And what happens in that film…and I like to think of it because when Mark Ruffalo’s character comes back, it’s not like everyone is suddenly faced with life or death, and he doesn’t really have that much that he needs to do…but relationships between the characters develop in such a way that a story is told.

Now the problem I’m having is that my setup is of the action/adventure genre, but my confrontation section, the feared second act, is of the You Can Count on Me genre. Or at least, that is how I am relating to it. And this, I think, gets at one of the biggest concrete problems I am having: THE WAY THAT I, AS A WRITER, AM RELATING TO, ENVISIONING, INSTINCTIVELY, THE SCENES THAT I AM SUPPOSEDLY CREATING IS CONTRARY TO THE LEVEL OF IMPORTANCE THEY NEED TO HAVE. In other words, I am trying to envision scenes that have a good deal of dramatic potency, but my head is in “Okay, let’s relax a little and write” mode; or “I think I’ll start writing now,” and the first things that comes to it are scenes that are similarly lax and accidental. And I find it is an extreme effort of will to start relating to my characters as people who are in their particular positions, rather than as reflections of me, secluded and privileged, off in the boonies with a few hours away from their children to kill lusciously.

And then, I externalize myself and see exactly what I have instinctively envisioned: these nowhere scenes that have no tension. Whereas, if I could make coming to writing a process of great necessity, or at least get it through my head that I have to imagine these scenes from a perspective of need, then maybe I could get some stuff down that would go somewhere.

But as it is, I have not been able to sustainedly do that. Perhaps I should start writing standing up. You know, sometimes I actually try writing lying down? I wonder whether my physical relationship to the process gets in my way. As it is, I have not been able to come up with an ending that makes sense, that feels logical, that feels not hokey.

And I am panicked because I see the end of the school year approaching, I see my deadline for having an outline (which was Nov. 1) receding behind me, and I am really honestly and truly afraid that I will not get this script written and that not even the threat of the inner torment this will cause me is getting me to get my shit together and start doing what it is I have supposedly been preparing to do my whole life. I am desperately afraid of having to switch careers because I don’t really want to. I feel like I will blame Persis and Burt for it, even though I have had sufficient time to get this thing done.

Why have I not made better use of it?

When I wrote my last script I was more able to write an outline, follow it, and come up with a finished product, though I may be misremembering. But my last script wasn’t good enough. And certainly the fear of what will happen if I don’t get this done is pretty intense, and perhaps intense enough to inhibit my performance. But I don’t know why I am having this problem. Every time I hit a crossroads, I panic and ultimately have to go back and tweak earlier parts to get the little wind-up toy that is the story to go past the block. And it’s not that I don’t think the story is getting slowly better. I think I have a clearer picture of the story then when I got to Ecksville.

But my great fear, the sort of dawning horror that is occupying my mind right now is that…I’m afraid that since I got here I have been largely spinning my wheels. I can’t accurately, as I’m sitting here, imagine where I was when I got to Ecksville, but it feels like I was pretty much stuck at the same place. For my own peace of mind I must go back and look, just a moment…


See, yes, I go back and I look at the notes that I wrote on June 30, and they are dealing with largely the same issue as I’m struggling with now. I mean I feel like I make progress with each breakthrough, but when I go back and look at my progress, it turns out to have been illusory. Now, I can’t say that with 100% conviction either; either because the thought of it being true truly terrifies me, or that because I really do think I have a better handle on who these characters are than when I got here. But can I say that for sure? No.

Somehow I have to press pass this point, jump into the void, and write my way to an end that I seem unable to envision convincingly.

This is why I am afraid I cannot write. Because I am not writing. I am diddling. I am diddling while imagining that I am writing. Somehow I was able to get from my germ of an idea to this point, but maybe I will not be able to get past it, and I will die here, starved and dehydrated from a lack of ideas, of imagination.

This is my Waterloo.

Though I was never great enough to even compare myself with Napoleon.

All kidding aside. I am really really afraid that I can’t get past this.

And this is the kind of thing that makes me go back to those images of shooting myself, this is where it comes from: the simultaneous moral need and constitutional inability to get past the point I’m stuck at.

And this is true of my life, too. I feel like I’m in suspended animation. I want to leave Ecksville, leave Persis, take Burt but have someone else take care of him, and restart my life somewhere else, and I imagine that somehow magically everything would fall into place.

I am a deluded fool, the kind of person I would talk to in the street and think as I walked away from him, “There but for the grace of God go I.” Except I’m I. Now I’m that guy whom the grace of God has forsaken, and I don’t know what to do to get back that grace.