[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.