I feel oppressed. I’m in my bedroom, my former bedroom that is, in my parents’ house, the site of so much strife (now I’m being dramatic) and masturbation…all the thoughts that have passed through me in here…I wish there was a way to post them up on my walls, ceilings, so that everything that has been experienced in a room somehow stays with it. Then I would be something other than oppressed here, with Bill and mom outside my room, the coffee cup and saucers clinking off the hardwood floors as Burt plays with them, and I am just waiting for someone to walk in so I can bark at them – someone who’s not Persis – so I can pass on to everyone my irritability. Persis talked to Bill about my “problems,” my “undermedication,” and she’s trying to make the case to him that I need to be more medicated…blah blah (I’m coming to hate that expression…though I am coming to hate it as a reader, identifying with other readers, rather than with you, the only person (I am having continually to remind myself) whose opinion matters, and that the point of my communication here is not to be …eloquent, but to be clear, to get it through to you what I am trying to say)…that said…anyway, relatives outside, making noise. I want to yell at them. Tell them all to go away, punish my mom and bill for not being more sensitive to my needs and our schedule. Although Persis is certainly difficult, she is right…or rather the umbrage, irritation she takes at their dysfunction, their strange relationship to plans and time, is well taken. I am starting to feel it too, starting to feel that my family is every bit (well perhaps not every bit, but legitimately) as dysfunctional as she is saying it is. I am starting to feel like peculiar traits that I used to just go along with are actually quite strange when compared to the rest of the world, and that my…as my family [i.e., Persis, Burt, and I] starts to have its own needs independent of my parents’ family, that there is an inevitable amount of strife (that world [word] again) and that I am now…well, I guess the thing is that I [, in my parents’ family, my needs] have always…almost always been accommodated. And those times that I haven’t, where I have been ignored or walked over, are significant moments in the history of my relationship with my family. And so now I’m in a position suddenly when I cannot just go along, where I have a child to consider, and Persis is also considering him to a degree, and while I may not have been willing to make waves in my family for Persis’s sake, who could easily adapt (at least in theory) to my family’s rhythms, Burt doesn’t have such a flexibility, and I have to come down hard to make sure that my family realizes that there is another person involved who is not at leisure to be flexible right now. That Burt, though…well, [that] Burt [himself] doesn’t know when to go to bed. Burt doesn’t know what the schedule of his day is, and though in theory they would say (although I don’t actually think they would) that Burt can make an exception with…[or rather] for a few days and just go with the flow, I don’t want to do that. I want him to maintain his schedule (which is good for him, so they say) and not feel like every time he comes to Grandma & Grandpa’s that all bets are off. And yet there seems to be this total disregard for the fact that the presence of Burt, and his inability to dictate his own schedule in a reasonable way, has to impact that rhythm of the family…and that it’s not just me trying to accommodate Persis, that I actually… See, this is important. I think that they all have this view of our relationship (mine and Persis’s) that basically projects onto her all of the conflict that might arise…or the cause of it…between me and my parents. So when there’s a scheduling issue like there was on Saturday night with dinner (BTW, which I had made several calls [in advance] to avoid. The issue, that is.) Then they blame Persis for it and see me ultimately as catering to her. So they get mad at her principally, though they may well be ticked off at me too, like mom was for what exact reason I have yet to find out. So that ends up undercutting me in two ways: one, in the obvious way that it ascribes absolutely no authority[, no will,] to me in the relationship, puts me in the role of Persis’s pawn, Persis’s spokesperson; and two, it also effectively prevents me from getting any issue that I have with my family from being listened to because the issue is always ascribed to Persis and swallowed behind growling teeth. So the fact that my family has a very hard time planning and scheduling beyond the “flow,” that never gets addressed in a meaningful way.

So it’s been hard recently, to have all these anxious, unpleasant feelings about mom and bill, and I too tend to ascribe that anxiety to Persis’s doing: she has put a wedge between me and them; which is actually the case, I think with [other] friends: Onyx, Charlie, Quinn.

I must talk about Quinn and the conversation we had, but that’s… Let me just finish here.

So I’m starting to find my parents harder to manage, and I’m feeling both mad at them for it and mad at Persis for it…just had to start the watch (fuck it, I’ll add some extra time at the end).

So these issues are very difficult to parse because on the one hand they may well be legitimate, and on the other hand part of… The part of me that feels that they are Persis’s fault makes me less likely to address those feelings, those behavioral mismatches with my family. Ascribing the problems to Persis is an effective evasion technique…although that doesn’t necessarily mean that such ascription is without a basis in fact.

Anyway, talking with Quinn, I realize that my worst fears about my relationship with Persis are true insofar as keeping in touch with my friends is concerned.

Just before we left for Ecksville, I called Marco to get together or something, and it turned out that he was going over to a…what was it…a memorial day party maybe…[thrown by my friends Roger & Quinn] that I wasn’t invited to. And the truth is that that really hurt my feelings [-- I had been one of their regulars once upon a time --] not in a paralyzing way, but in a way that I said to myself, “Okay, something has gone on, and I must take action to address it.” And that action was to crash Roger and Quinn’s party in the interest of seeing them, knowing that they would not mind seeing me, knowing that they might be a little sheepish about not inviting me (and I sensed that behind the upright social veil; but only, too, because I dropped little lines like, “Thanks for allowing me to come,” [though I did not consciously intend to invoke those feelings.]). And it was good that I went, and I believe that they were gen--…and I’m talking especially about Quinn here, who I would imagine drives more of these decisions (and I am tempt--…no I’m not going to pander to that; I am speaking to you, Garth Goldberg, never let me forget that). But the thing that went unsaid was that Quinn and Persis don’t really get along. And it was something that I knew from Persis’s end because, you know, we talk. (Mom just put on a generic version of Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons” in the background. Want to drive a stake through that stereo. Put a sock in it.) But with Quinn, I just sort of sensed that there wasn’t a match there…I mean, that was pretty obvious, but the underlying feelings, dynamics were what I was not sure of. And I thought that maybe Quinn didn’t invite me because she didn’t want Persis to come. And my going over there with Burt, by my doing that, I wanted to say, essentially, “Look, don’t not include me because you don’t like my wife.” I wanted also…and I actually articulated that to her and had I… Well, it would have gone something like this. “Don’t exclude me because you don’t want to include my wife. She and I are independent enough that I can go to a party without her, and moreover, I am sensitive enough to her idiosyncrasies and her inability to make casual relationships work with certain types of people that I don’t even blame you for not wanting her here. The truth is that I have more fun at parties without her.”

Hmmm.

And maybe…and that is something else that I have to stop because it has become like a shorthand…that skipping [of] lines to indicate…like, idea punctuation. I don’t mind it when it conveys a general sense of a pause, of actual space that occurs with my stream of consciousness. But where it is simply done for dramatic effect, that’s cheating. And isn’t that how art goes to shit anyway? We as artists are unavoidably drawn back to those tropes that have proven effective in the past, and we reuse them to express similar or even identical ideas because they were used effectively in the past to communicate those ideas. But in doing so one is of course no longer expressing the current idea, but reexpressing the past one even if that past one happens to be indistinguishable in quality and context from the present one. It is essentially an aesthetic act of recycling rather than synthesis and that is why those things inevitably fall flat: because they do not communicate anything current and necessary, but rather are always ultimately referring back to something past and dead.

In any case, what I wanted to say was that maybe I’m just leading up to the idea that I don‘t like going to parties with her. [That is, Persis.]

I am choking myself off. This week I have started to let Persis see the earlier posts. I have given her June and July, which contain a certain amount of harsh… What am I saying? In many ways, those are among the worst ones [i.e., dumps on Persis] because it was smack in the middle of the time that I was cursing the world in general…but she’s my wife, so she bears the brunt of it. But it would also be irresponsible of me to ascribe all of those digs (I say that as a shorthand for the quality of information that I was communicating about her; I was not at all meaning to say mean things about her [for their own sake]) to my mood, since that is what she always does. Many of those things are legitimate complaints that I have. And I’m afraid that some of them cut to the bone. So I am writing about this with some degree of trepidation because I know that by the time…or at some point in time, she may well be among those people who are reading my sessions with you, and for that reason I am having to consider what it might be like for her to read this.

(Now, that’s a pretty big indictment. I mean, how can I be expected to be honest with you when that preoccupation is hanging over me? Already, I have avoided going in several directions, saying several certain things so as not to have Persis have to read them. This gets so recursive: because now Persis will read about the fact that I am hiding things even from the blogs, and while with those first couple of months she can read them and take some degree of…I don’t know…comfort?…that they are the truth at that time, but now, these entries she will always have to read and wonder if in fact I have withheld anything from her. This is in an odd way like time travel; it’s like trying to project myself into the future and anticipate the reaction…the differential reactions that a particular reader may have to what I am writing and to yet try not to let that knowledge overwhelmingly affect what I am writing, but still [being] unable to completely put out of my mind the reaction that will… Anyway, you see. It’s hard to know how best to proceed. I no longer feel, for example, as much of a release when I sit down to write you, and that is the seed of dissembling: that discomfort at the base of my solar plexus that fears the complexity that speaking the truth will introduce into my life. I am definitely feeling that right now. It makes me sad, and makes me feel like I have ruined, polluted, like, this clear stream that I used to be able to drink from, derive sustenance from; and now the idea that it is no longer only mine, and that these other people are also drinking from it and maybe shitting in it is giving me pause.)

A deep breath… Trying to go back into that place of myself where the truth is clear like that pure water.











I am in a period of transition with this blog, and one of the most irritating things about it to me is that the transition and my feelings about it mean that I spend more time talking about the blog in my blog than I feel is optimal. I…, and I have to wonder here who I’m talking to. I would like this me--… Let‘s start over.

I don’t like it that all my sessions with you are taken up by concerns about the blog. Though certainly, those feelings are on my mind, I don’t think that my act of blogging is particularly universal or significant. It’s like as if…I were (that last ellipsis was a lie, put in for effect. I came up with this analogy instantly, and yet am trying to disguise [the instantaneity of] it.) It is as if I were to have stolen a car, and I spend all my time obsessing [so much] about the fact that I’ve stolen it that I’m afraid to drive it…so what was the purpose of stealing it in the first place? I really feel like on some level what I am doing is wrong. One of the ideas that came up, that I had to articulate for the first time to someone, at Roger & Quinn’s party, [the one last night,] was the idea that… Well, William once asked me if I wasn’t… When I initially told him that I was concealing all this [blogging, or the possibility thereof] from Persis, he asked me if… I’ve forgotten what his exact words were, but he said that the psychologist in him would ask if there…if I was actually wanting Persis to find out. And the truth of the matter is that I think the answer to that is ‘no.’ And I like to think that if I felt I could ethically go as far as I would like to with this blog without telling Persis, that I would have done that. But there has come a point when I want to be spending more time on this, more effort at…(Burt knocking at the door)…I don’t know, promoting it, researching ways to circulate. And at that point, given that she is my wife and that I don’t like this feeling of compartmentalization – boy, that’s a thought that deserves some more time – I really wanted to tell her. The truth is that having this blog as something I was excited about was taking over more and more of my conscious time and I didn‘t want that to have to be something I have to conceal from her.

I still have this nagging knot below my solar plexus. A hint that I have not yet dredged out the truth.

The truth is that I am excited about her finding out…because it will let me off the hook. I will no longer feel that I am doing something wrong because it will be being done with her knowledge. What I feel bad about is that I know that it will hurt her, and that…that I don’t care much if it will hurt her. I am truly scared about what it will do to our relationship. My fantasy…, my fantasy is that Persis reads this and realizes how unhappy I have been and that she is, well, one of the things that I am unhappy about, and also realizes how little attention she has really been paying to addressing those things that she says she is “working on.” She’s been working on it, she says. What a load. And maybe she would feel dismissed, hurt if I were to say that to her (In fact I do. That I don’t believe that she is actually… Not because she doesn’t want to in the moment…, but just for the same reason as I have always thought about how nice it would be to just lie on my bed and talk to the ceiling instead of going to a therapist. And the truth is that that might well do me some good, but the truth is also that I – despite its money-saving potential – have never even attempted (to my knowledge) to do that. It’s just not something one ever really does on one’s own precisely because there are defenses mobilized to defend oneself from going certain places, defenses that are only likely to be breached in the structure of a therapist appointment, being responsible to someone else to be on the couch. (Mom’s calling me. I want to tell her to shut up, and that I’m working, and no, I cannot just come here for a sec. Deal with him yourself, you flaky bitch. Or have you forgotten how?) So, no, I don’t really believe that Persis is “working” on those things; and moreover, I believe that her…asserting as strongly as she does that she is working on them is an additional defense designed to prevent me from insisting that she go into therapy. So that’s really the elephant in the room that I want to mention. I hope that her reaction to these posts will have her herself (unlikely) or her to insist that we as a couple (more likely) go into therapy. And that would be good news. I hope it doesn’t make her actually want to leave (though that feels unlikely to me in my heart). I don’t think that she would. But she would make my life miserable, making it clear at every turn the degree to which she was [would be] withholding herself from me (of course, not realizing that she withholds herself to a good degree now anyway) and though I can certainly see how some of my behavior might drive someone back into her shell, I don’t honestly think that I’m the builder of this wall (gag me on that; I have the Sting song…what’s it called, “And if I built this fortress around your heart, encircled you with trenches and (sorry folks, I have to see it through) barbed wire; then let me build a bridge for I cannot…the chasm (what’s the missing word; I want to say ‘feel,’ or that’s what pops into my head, which may be significant, though I know that that is not it) ; let me set the battlements on fire.” I do feel that way, authentically, about Persis. I would really love…and this is the only hope that I feel for our relationship to be actually happy…and shoot me, but I actually think that this is within the realm of possibility – distant possibility, but there, on the far, far horizon – possible that we could learn to not lob these…what?…what are those big blazing arrows they used to toss into medieval fortresses…? Anyway, those. I feel like I, too, have built walls to protect me from her. And the problem is that each time, say…either of us puts out, sends an emissary (forgive me, I’m having fun) out of the fortress to broach peace terms, that emissary is shot at, mowed down, resisted, denied entry. And I don’t know what it is going to take to have that not happen. But I do not think that we can do it on our own without a significant commitment of time. I think we should be in couples therapy twice a week. I would happily do that instead of analysis. Maybe that’s where…(I haven’t told you, but Reinhardt offered me a four-day-a-week slot that I would love to jump at. The idea of going into analysis is very exciting to me, as you know.)…maybe that’s where this negotiation is headed. She doesn’t want me to spend that kind of money, and I counter that the only way that I am going to not spend it is if we go into therapy twice a week and she goes once a week. That is the only way that I will not go into analysis.

I don’t know how this plays out. At Roger and Quinn’s we were talking about…or not talking about, but frequently came up the idea of [that at] a certain point around this time of life and life of the [their] relationships, that people finally drop their illusions of what their marriage is, their fantasies about themselves that has brought them to a point of misery and dysfunction, and instead engage the reality of things, and that some people can’t, won’t face that and instead opt to walk away as opposed to accepting the way things are and trying to heal them and make the best of it. I don’t know which of those Persis is, but another guy who was talking about these issues at R & Q’s articulated it well when he said that… or the idea that he was invoking was that someone’s conception of a relationship is [may] ultimately [be] narcissistic in that it is more about his or her fantasy about who she is/should be rather than an sober and sensitive choice of mates and an understanding of what marriage actually is. And I guess what I was saying then and what I’ll repeat now is that I don’t even have absolute faith that Persis will be able to turn her back on her narcissism and [will not] instead will turn her back on our relationship when her fantasy is challenged by the barrage of salvos from this blog to her embattlements.

Vaguely nauseous. Always a mystery where I will end up starting. I think about these things all the time, you know. Will I tell about this or that conversation, as if the events themselves are daring me to introduce them to you. I say ‘you’ with some discomfort, now, more discomfort than I have articulated previously, because I have cast you adrift this past week. I say this past week like this has become a diary. Yuck. This is not a diary. I must not hesitate to remain firmly in contact, in touch, in connection with you, even though I have cast you off, told you in your office that I would no longer be writing to you, dear John (and that is borrowing a phrase I used in our in-person session), and that you like the rest of the world will have to find me online, impersonally…though still writing to you. This whole paragraph makes me uneasy, because of course you know all this, so why must I tell you, unless I am mugging for the camera. You know that I have given you the big finger, told you to get lost.

Not wanted you to.

Oh, how dramatic that was, creating that new paragraph to say exactly the opposite of what I was saying. How effective. How writerly. How…what?…I make fists in the air as I write…forceful? I am no longer in your office. I am on stage. I must forget about all that.

I need to proceed as if you are still there. I know you will be on occasion. I know you will tune in now and then. You told me. (But of course you know that; why must I tell you?) I will write for that timeless, or unappointed, time, when you will click on to me…right? Okay. Let‘s just pretend that nothing has happened.

As I was saying, it is always a mystery where I will begin. That is one of the mysteries of therapy to me, that I can have all these things circulating in my head, but somehow the one that just comes out in the moment of actual writing is the one that matters. I don’t know. I kind of have this image of a blockage, like loose mud. And any ar--…what?…think of the physics. I think of the mud outside, the sludge in the rain, or diarrhea. Imagine a puddle of that on a slope. Not diarrhea, because it all just rushes out willy-nilly. But…what’s the feeling I have?



Thinking.






I’m thinking of cooking, something in the kitchen, like breaking the skin of some thickened heated milk, something that will not run on its own, but once the skin is pricked, or the opening opened…it comes out. So think of that. And imagine…I don’t know…a line of force…(What does this have to do with anything…am I writing for you or for the world?)…an obstruction within that restrained puddle. Like in a subway line. A bunch of people waiting to barge through, and in the middle of the crowd, a bigger man, more aggressive (Persis), who will push a little harder than everyone else.

And once that gate is opened, yes, the crowd, the liquid will spill through, but that thing that is pushing the hardest will come out before the others. It is not like falling. It is not like the pebble and the baby grand hitting the ground at the same time. It is about psychic pressure. The admixture still has tension as it comes out, a desire, no, a force restraining it…surface tension…trying to keep it in. But that thing that is in the middle, away from the sides, either exerting more forward pressure or not as subject to restraint…(What is that? Repression? Does that mean that even those things most subject to repression are not likely to come out at first? I suppose that would be consistent with my experience. That the big release, and big ‘ahhhhhhh’s, like giant turds, must also wait until the meager [In the sense of quality here, not quantity] scum has cleared out, later in the session.)…where was I?…

So I guess it really does not matter where I start. That opening that is provided by the beginning of talking or typing will determine the slope of, the downward…the…what is the opposite of apex?…anyway, that. I am tempted to look up the word. It would be very in character. I resist because of the pressure, the urging from Reinhardt, whom I am now seeing exclusively and thanks to the fact that I am no longer paying you to read these, you moocher (I can call you anything I want, right?, because you are likely not reading. Of course, I could do the same before, you poser, but only did so when it seemed appropriate. This hostility toward you, which came up in the post this week – that is, a month ago – continues. I suppose I am just getting out the aggression and grief of this change that makes me anxious. Whatever. Poser.)…uh…Reinhardt…

So we are talking about going more than once a week, or twice a week, as it is also called in some instances. I am wary. Why am I still writing to you? Why do I not write to her? She does not have a right to this. She does not have the right to come in and interrupt what was so wonderfully established before her fat form (I hope she never reads this) plopped onto the landscape. She is an interloper. An interplopper. I want to continue writing to you.

But as I have expressed in her office, I am worried that my time with her will actually detract from this, that it will be…this is cool, it’s like, for a writer, time spent in the psychologist’s office is like the sin of Onan: spilled seed. Material discharged to someone where it will disappear forever. It cannot be disemboweled…that’s not the word…disinterred. Although disemboweled…like taken out of the bowels…like the diarrhea…I really do associate the release, the process of this confession to a process of shitting. Popping a zit. Whence that more than physical…it is psychic, psychic…release when a zit is popped? Dare I say it is one of the most enjoyable, enlightening (in the sense of making one lighter), freeing, and delightful feelings in the world? I prance down a meadow of yellow…what?…those mustardy flowers…[or] edelweiss?…imagine Julie Andrews and the Von Trapp children all popping their zits and singing about it. Do re mi fa so la ti pllllpp! I am mugging for the camera. But it is authentic. This is what this process feels like.

And what right has Reinhardt to it? To take away from this. I brought up with her the fear that I had that was instilled in me by David Lynch who, in an interview that I read sometime after Blue Velvet changed my life, said that he had one session with a therapist and when he asked if his creativity would be affected by continued treatment, the shrink said it might be and he [David Lynch] left. I have had much scorn for that, since so far, in the grand scheme, therapy has made my creativity more…clear…I don’t know. I have…it’s weird. I want to say that it has made the serum that comes out of my zits (now I’m talking about my work in general, not just here. …See, I am now calling this ‘work.’ That is a change. It is not just secret confession out of necessity. It is performance. Forgive me. I will never get back to what it was.), it has made that serum run clear, rather than pussy…oops…no…that’s right, isn’t it? Full of pus? Pussy? Pusy? Ooh, what an unfortunate…what is that called when two words with unrelated and even opposed meanings are spelled the same?…No, I will not look it up…but ‘pussy’ and ‘pussy.’ Love that one. [I have done the research for you, you poser; and it is inconclusive. Take that, and that. You, oh pussiest of pussies.]

Anyway, so therapy has been good to me, but…or has it? Well, back to this fear…and see, I want my ex…my exhument…That is a word now: ‘exhument’…not ‘excrement’ (that which is excreted, that material)…but that material which is exhumed. Maybe it is a word already. I hope not. That will be my contribution to literature. ‘Exhument.’ Created by the author Joel Geller to mean a word…aw, fuck this nonsense. No, I kind of want to go with it. ‘“Exhument.” That which is exhumed, esp. in reference to psychic material that emerges, like congealed sebum, from a pimple when [com]depressed targetedly between two fingers. Coined by the author Joel Geller in his groundbreaking work, To My Poser, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2007.’ [After the fact, the alternate and more accurate ‘extrudent’ occurred to me. I’ll have to think about that; it appears to have already been used in English.]

Shit. Burt banging banging banging in the background. Must go close the door.

I‘m not sure I like this new…I am envisioning my friend Charlie laughing at all these things. He told me what he thought…I saw him after I saw you and we got stoned together and it was good to see him and it reminded me of what I am missing here in this little hippietown: friends. It is all right except for that, and if Charlie would only move to…and I miss my friend Justin Wolff. I think about him a lot. I want to send him a copy of that letter that I found from him recently, the one that accompanied the xeroxes of the Jock Sturges picture that he acquired for the Bowdoin Museum of Art that ended with ‘All my love, Justin.’ I want to ask him what happened to that relationship. Why did he cast it out like I am [casting you out]…no, with him there was no warning. I told him that maybe I was or was at one point in love with him and the next time I saw him he was distant and we had a bad meal at that pseudo-…what?…Barbados Grill? No, doesn’t matter, where my sister’s…fuck this…and then…nothing from him, and all attempts to reach him nothing. He was my Charlie in…this is it: This is what pains me so much about moving. I have no Charlie, no Justin, no James here to comfort me. To keep me company at night when all the excretia of the day has passed. No one to get high with. No one to…this idea that that person is supposed to be your spouse is fucking…fucking fucked up. I mean, I could no sooner do that with Persis than I could marry Charlie. Though certainly I have fantasized about that. He, or Justin, and I living happily ever after. Together. Our wives kept quietly and contentedly in the next room…no, in, like, the basement…or the guest house. That’s good. I don’t mean to disrespect them. They are a part of it all. I can’t really give it up for [i.e., get excited about] sex with Charlie (sorry guy)…(and see, those little asides shouldn’t be allowed…it is proof that this is all posing…I must…I want to purify this. Charlie proposed the idea of a phantom blog, a decoy blog. Maybe I will do this, and write yet another blog to Reinhardt, and that will be the real thing. I will fool myself into being honest by making myself think that one of the sessions is for her and me alone, and then a month later I will fool myself by publishing the Reinhardt one instead! MWA HA HA HA HA HA!!!!) but the idea of having wives put away in the back while he and I had a life of just being and talking and woring [I can’t figure out what the hell I meant by this, but it was assuredly not the word that here lacks an ‘h’. – Ah! Spell check to the rescue: ‘working.’ Shows you the first place my mind goes. MWA HA HA HA HA HA!!!!] and getting high together would be absolutely…I mean…tell me, really: What is the problem with that? Even if it wasn’t the guest house. What if we bought two lots adjoining…or I see it as opening on parallel streets with their [the lots’] backs facing each other. And Lucy and Persis could live in one and Joel and Charlie could live in the other, and there would be…there would even be two heated underground tunnels between the houses: one for Joel and Persis’s use, and one for Charlie and Lucy. The couples need never get tangled up with each other. It could just…and the couples could communicate within themselves whenever they wanted, you know, Persis could call and ask if she could come over and I would say yes (unless I said no), and she would walk through her tunnel and talk to me. But make no mistake, it would be my house and Charlie’s house. And…well, we would have to talk about Lucy’s rules. I mean, it would defeat the purpose if she could just come over whenever she wanted. There would have to be a protocol that both couples followed. Charlie and I would agree…there would be, like a direct phone line. Like between Washington and Moscow. And either buddylink (that’s the word for the buddy pair that came into my mind) could unplug the phone and would only do so as a mutual decision. And the…okay, it could even be that the phone would be default plugged in, but would be unplugged by each buddy twosome whenever and with no questions asked. So basically Persis could only…and of course Lucy with Charlie…could only get in touch with me when both buddy twosomes wanted the line to be open. Now if Charlie wanted Lucy to be able to get in touch with him and I didn’t…that’s something that Charlie and I would have to work out. But Lucy would never get involved in that. God, that would be so much simpler and more pleasurable.

See, I’ve moved, now permanently, to this nice, wet, green, easy place, and one of its primary virtues is that it is easy to…it is small, you know, you can get across it without…and to the middle of it without much effort. And so if Justin lived anywhere in Ecksville, we could be at a table sitting over beers in fifteen minutes. Home in an hour. But I don’t have anyone like that. And I don’t know how to cultivate that…well, I do, but it takes time, and I don’t have time. I don’t want to invest in an arbitrary relationship. I’ve never done that. I’ve always been handed relationships, and that’s when magic happens. James, Justin, Charlie…roommates whom I was e--…well, I was forced into proximity with them.

But with marriage I am forced out of proximity with anyone who might fill that need for me. It’s a damn shame.





A deep breath.




The clock ticks down.





I don’t want to shoot my wad in Reinhardt’s office. I want to bring everything here. I realized that there is so much stuff that you do not know about…or that you did not learn about here. Persis’s appointment process, how degrading and frustrating and protracted it was for her. Not part of my exhumence, exhumia, what was the word? Ex..hum..ent. But there…But that’s also what I don’t want this to be, as I have already said: a diary. This is not about…I’ve been reading other dad blogs [A lie. I have been roughly scanning them, conveniently, so as not to be able to appraise any of them too high for my ego’s health.], and they’re all…even well written ones, I’m not knocking…(and here I am afraid that they will be reading. I am pitiful.) But they’re all these daily postings, ‘this happened then this happened,’ and maybe some benign reflections. But not me. (Ding. Time’s up.) Me, I’m better than all that. I am the grandest whiner of them all. Fuck that optimistic ‘Oh isn’t this cute look at my harried life and my lovely wife and I’m trying to survive but doing it with a pasty smile.’ No, I’m like, yeah world, fuckin’ eat my exhumence. This is what living is like. It sucks acid.

I came up with a good analogy – isn’t it nice tooting one’s horn (ugh, cliché) – in an earlier post: living like biting into a lemon. But now I’m on free time and just writing because it’s there to do. Like those other loser bloggers. Let them bow (in worship and shame) at my feet.

It’s my birthday, 36. A perfect square. Which, I would like to say, is how I can describe myself, but it doesn’t seem exactly apt. It would be a nice touch, though, no?

I kick myself…or no, what’s the proper word for what I do inside upon thinking something like that, something that would have value only for literary sake, and gets not one…or at a false truth (if that makes any sense). Certainly, there is a touch of the square about me: withdrawn, not particularly emotive (though that hasn’t always been true)…(though I feel that except around Burt for whom I make a special effort, my affect is often blunted…a result of my brain chemistry?).

Here I am associating without much purpose, no direction to anything I’m saying, no interest…though I guess one could ask of what value is ‘interest,’ but that’s just another rhetorical figure and not something I’m actually wondering about.

I seem to be interested in avoiding all of the things that I am thinking about and instead focusing on the structural process of writing, and not only that, but on the reasons…I‘m gonna stop this now, because I actually want to use this time to try to get at something real, rather than just conceptually free associating and (it feels like to me) removing myself from the equation.

Anyway, my birthday…a big number, and I mean big not in terms of amount (though 36 is older than I’d rather be), but numerically, symbolically. Yes, a square, and I won’t have one of these for another 13 years, and then I’ll really be at a cusp. I guess I’m at a cusp now, transitioning from my mid-thirties to my late-thirties. But 36…the fact that it’s a square feels significant to me…and it’s a multiple of 18, which as you (the not ‘you’ to home [whom] all of these new…what?…‘missives’…that word brings up an angry letter I wrote to my dad once, where I sarcastically characterized one of his notes that he wrote to me…a note that was about financial matters, which is…well, this note was one of his elegant constructions in which he, too, removed himself and (it felt like) any love from the writing and sent it to me a almost like a pronouncement from on high, although that is not how he meant it. He is coming up tonight to see me and we are going to dinner, just to the two of us…)…

I am wanting to tell him about this blog. I am wanting…

But before that, I want to get in the other reason that 36 is important to me…the multiple of 18, which I said you (presuming you are Jewish; I have always assumed that you are, though without any confirmation) would know is the number of life, chai…I don’t know how to write Hebrew characters, so I’ll…well, you get the picture, and 36…as you know…is a number of dollars often given at Bar or Bat Mitzvahs to symbolize a wish for life. I wish for life now. I wish for more of it. I wish for a better one, a happier one, a more reconciled one, though more on that in a sec.

Anyway, I am feeling the impulse to share the blog with more people, and I think that comes from a number of places. One is that another friend of mine chimed in on stuff that she read here, and again, I become very selfconscious about referring to people who may be…well, you know all this, I don’t know why I keep having to go over it; it is a condition of my writing, my discourse…whatever. Anyway, she wrote me an email that she had been holding back, I think, and told me that she was proud of my efforts at being honest and authentic but thought that a lot…or some anyway…of what she read in the blog was sad. Very sad. Did she say profoundly sad? That is how I remember it. And that really gave me pause. I read it and I had a very complex reaction to it, the first overtone of which (I’m speaking of the shades of feeling, you know like overtones in a chord, brought up) was this sense of, “Oh fuck. I have actually done what on some level I set out to do. Which was to show the people I am close to, a select few, that I am very sad, and that I feel trapped in the life I am in, and that I want to get out.” And here Quinn was, saying that she thought…or that she wanted as a friend to tell me to get the hell out of ‘there’ (meaning my relationship with Persis presumably, or Ecksville), and my then feeling like, ‘Okay, so here’s the world, giving me an opening, and what are you going to do now?” And my answer to myself was: “Nothing. I am going to do nothing. I am going to invent all sorts (or a least a good solid few) reasons why I will not do anything, why I will not get out of this relationship and this life, all of which boil down to the same thing: I am scared. I am scared of not finding anything to replace it, and I am scared of making a big mistake by leaving it. The “bearing those ills we have” thing, you know.’ And I looked at those reasons, and I felt very small, very timid and here I want to inflict upon myself all of those adjectives that could possibly be inflicted upon someone in my position…and I want to do it not necessarily because I feel them, because I feel myself to be those things, but because they are simply available to be inflicted: I want to use whatever weapon I can to cut myself even if it is not appropriate. Yeah, that’s healthy.

And then I put her note aside, because I wanted to respond, and I wanted…I hate merely repeating what has gone on before…it feels very derivative…like valueless, uninflected narration. Of what good is it? …But I wanted to address her comments in a meaningful way that did three things: 1) Thanked her for being honest with me, which seemed from her note to be something she hesitated to do; 2) Addressed the specific adjective….with which she coated the blog, or some of it (because she did not read the whole thing, which I find myself resenting…and again, the self-consciousness about her reading this arises, even though she may not return…I could talk about that resentment…but I wonder whether I would do so as a message to her, which would not be appropriate here, or a message to you because that fact, the not-reading and the resentment, is important to me. I find myself also wanting to modify for her…you know what, I’m going to stop this.

Anyway, so 2) Address the ‘sad’ parts of what I’ve posted (I hesitate to use ‘written’ because that sounds pretentious to me); and 3) Justified my abidance in this life, this world, this relationship that made [, which justification would make] me seem like something other than an abject coward.

So these were all the…well, not all…because I’m not so blind to the implications of her note that I refused to look to the opportunity she presented me with: getting out. “Would that be an appropriate response to her?” I kind of implicitly wondered (though again I cite the image-based structure of my thoughts, rather than their linearity), to say, “You are right.. I should not be here. I am leaving.”




A breath.




And what I finally put down in my response to her…was something that felt honest…it felt like the right answer for me…but it was also one of the most sanguine things I have written about my life in a long time, which surprised the hell out of me, especially insofar as I think I believed it. I basically said: ‘1) You are a true friend for writing me this and I don’t in any way want to…what?…shut down that…whatever that open connection was that enabled you to finally make the decision to write to me; 2) Yes, much of what I have w--…‘written’ makes me sad, too; and 3)…and I… I don’t want to leave.’ I didn’t say that I didn’t want to leave. I said that the blog, because of its format, was skewed toward the negative (though this was misleading, because in fact, my whole headspace is so skewed, and that is not specific to the blog…though certainly I am not moved to write about all of the times I am at home with Persis and Burt (‘all of the times’?…I should say ‘the times,’ the slowly increasingly number of times) and we feel like a family that is slugging through a difficult period, all of the moments of pleasure in my life, even though admittedly they do not at this point amount to such a level that they do more than mitigate…yes, right now they mitigate rather than characterize…but I’m saving the best for last here. Because I really had an insight as I was writing this. I said that…I’m trying to reexperience this from the heart (ugh, did I just write that?) rather than quote it. I told her that writing the blog was bringing me in touch with how I am simultaneously ordinary and special. That is,…and this bears some…

A new paragraph. I have been reminded of the line… When it came out, The Big Chill was…it became one of my favorite movies I have [had] ever seen. This was, what?, in 1983, I think. Three years before Blue Velvet rocked my world. What were the other favorites at the time? I don’t know. There was something else on the tip of my tongue but I am blocking it. Anyway, there’s a moment where Meg Tilly’s character says, in the midst of a group discussion…and I think this was one of the lines featured in the previews…, “I haven’t met that many happy people. How do they act?” And I recall at this moment that the line gets a kind of “oh boy, is this chick fucked up” look from people, though knowing what the tone of the movie was I don’t know that that’s true. Anyway, I feel like I’m encountering some permutation of that line, like…I don’t know if I’m happy or not, but if I am happy, then this is how [happy] people act, and if I’m not happy, then…well, I don’t really see how much realistically happier I can get without selectively ignoring certain aspects of my life. I mean, I think about my sex life…I fucking hate that term…what am I referring to when I say that?…my relationship to my sexuality, my desire to be cherished and pleasured and to pleasure…and I know that it is not what I would most want, not anywhere close. And my relationship with Persis, which is to say my marriage…? Ideal? Not at all.



Thinking.



Not ideal. But if it were ideal, what would it look like? And the rule I gave myself answering that question is that I had to answer it realistically, (this is all after the fact analysis; the whole thing just kind of happened in my head) and I had to couch it in the context of the rest of my life, which is to say that I couldn’t just say, “Oh, I wish Persis were exactly what I wanted her to be at all times and I wish I were happy and satisfied with every aspect of my life, and I wish I had no complaints about anything in my life.” That to me is what not-sad would look or sound like to me. And, hello, that’s not happening. I’m a complainer. My head is designed to find the parts of the picture that need fixing and to fix them. And some of them cannot be fixed, or not easily.


So this is all to say that the writing, this writing, and the responses I am getting to it are helping me to regard my situation as exactly that typical…this is hard to express…



I, as I said before, I am….I am beginning to see myself as a member of the human race who in many important and valuable ways is just average. I am probably…I recognize that I am fortunate in many ways, [but] I am probably not significantly happier…well, I’d probably say that I’m…if such a thing would be quantified, less happy than the average person. But that’s not because I’m less fortunate; it’s because of the gifts that I have for scrutiny, analysis, and synthesis.

This is kind of big for me, so I would like you to pat yourself on the back for contributing to my getting to this place.

So I am…my life is in many ways average, or typical. But what makes me special is my…and I’m not going to couch this in the polite modesty with which I answered my friend…ability to take that averageness and typicality and turn it into something…sad. Beautifully sad, maybe. To present who I am in a way that can affect people.

This is very vain.

It is entirely a result of the feedback that three people have given me: you, and my two friends to whom I have referred here.

I picture Quinn saying, “Okay, now he’s gotten carried away. This whole…trendy ‘blog’ thing has gone to his head and is making him think he’s, like, this great ‘writer’ and all. He is wielding the term ‘blog’ as he would the term ‘novel,’ and it is embarrassing. He does not edit himself, he has an exaggerated picture of his talent and his value.” But I would also imagine that she would add, “But if it floats his boat, good luck to him.”





Thinking.






So in a few words…I feel like the process of writing this, to you, to friends, and getting feedback has been expansive and healing for me. It does not, of course, ‘solve’ any of the sad problems I have…but it also doesn’t…what?…it does cause me to think about what other people would write were they inclined and able to about their everyday lives. And the truth is, I am really beginning to think (“Maybe I’m wrong,” [I might add as a hedge for] Quinn) that if they were truly honest and unbounded with their thoughts about their lives, what other people would write would not look so different from what I am writing.




And that is…it’s exciting to me. The bell.




[I am taking my new independence from you as an opportunity to revise the rules (which revision was implicit in last week’s ‘missive,’) such that I will be permitted make relevant additions as necessary. And I just want to add – because in rereading I remember that this is what I was building up to – that the insight and appreciation of my own, maybe, ‘place in the world’ that has come about as a result of sharing these virtual sessions with others makes me want to figure out a way to expand the audience of people to whom…the audience of people who are reading this, if that is (I feel like I’m being grandiose here) possible or feasible. I want people to read this, and I am increasingly wanting the people I care about to know about it, too. I need some…I want to figure out a way to do this, perhaps even to the point of letting Persis know that it is going on. I do not think she should read any of it just yet, though, and I am afraid she will not be able to restrain herself from doing so.]

An impulse session, not only because I want to write to try and get down some of the stuff that I just--

12:15pm

Fuck fuck fuck fuckfuuuuuuuuuuuck!

This, as I started to say, is an impulse session because I haven’t been able to (read: ‘haven’t made the time,’ but really, I haven’t been able to) get to sit down to write for the last…what, three days??? I keep meaning to do it at night, but Burt is sick, and I keep having to spend the night sitting in the room with him so he won't wake up every thirty seconds, which means I either have to write sitting in the bed (as I once did) or not do it, since he seems to be waking up anyway and keeping me company and becoming very interested in whatever is going on on the laptop. So I haven’t been able to get started, and now it turns out that Burt has been puking at daycare, and now they’re sending him home until he is 24 hrs. symptom-free and that means that I am going to have to be taking care of him all by myself for the next day and a half since Persis is going out of town for yet another job interview, and she won’t be back until tomorrow night, late. So all tomorrow I’ll be handling a sick kid, when I haven’t gotten a chance (I hate that locution ‘gotten a chance’…I just haven’t done it, which is not to say that I’m beating myself up for not doing it (though there is an element of that) but just because ‘haven’t gotten a chance’ is this stinking foul cliché that makes me sound simple and helpless and…I just haven’t done it…and that doesn’t mean (as I seem bent upon swearing up and down to say) that I couldn’t (though it does, no it doesn’t, yes it does, no it doesn’t…ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh! [That’s a scream, not relief.]

Persis was sick last night, and so when I expected her to come home at 6:00 pm and take over or at least help out, instead she came home at 4pm and threw up, so I spent the evening having to take care of both a sick Burt and a sick wife, and I was feeling pretty good about it by the time bedtime came around last night because I felt like I was really getting proficient if not good…I could never be good at it because of how shitty SHITTY I feel about having to do it, and now…

Anyway so no more writing for a day and a half, no more anything except slaving over this dumb stupid vomiting infant who can’t let himself be left alone and why don’t I just dry up into that residue that’s left on the inside of one’s nostrils after a good bout of mucus excretion, that’s what I am, that’s what I feel like I am atrophying and not to mention I had all this stuff that I wanted to say, but now I’m taking up this whole session (because let’s face it, I’m now on borrowed time and I’ll have to stop in the middle anyway to go get Burt from the car since Persis is dropping him off before leaving on her trip, and then hopefully he’ll nap assuming he doesn’t get awakened by the process of having to clean up his soiled reeking articles of pukey clothing and then I can try to sit down again (maybe) and finish this but still it won’t be continuous and as I said there was all this stuff I wanted to say (or add) about the Reinhardt session that I had this morning and about the fact that this is my first session not writing for your eyes but instead for those eyes of everybody else although right now I’m doing a hell of a job being mad enough at god and the world that I’ve conveniently forgotten about all those unpleasant facts like the one that the people (or a few anyway) who are in fact reading this may well be the ones I’m having feelings about and that has got me up in arms with myself for having told anyone ever about this since if only I hadn’t opened my big mouth I might even be able to express myself still, and…what?…now I’ve jinxed it and maybe I’ll have to start--)--

Phone’s ringing, Persis’s here, later…

----------
Minutes later after having drudged the unconscious (but not long enough) boy upstairs and put his pukey rags in the wash and Persis’s suited up and going to the airport. I have taken my 3pm Neurontin at 12:30 and am ready to take another dose in four hours and maybe even get stoned although I don’t like doing that as you know because of how it makes me feel about Burt, but right now, there isn’t much except Burt stabbing me in the back with a butcher knife that would make me feel worse about him (not that his being sick is his fault, I don’t blame him for being…well let’s just say it’s as if he were to accidentally and unknowingly stab me in the back) right now (looking back to the beginning of the parens) and…what?…than…feel worse about him than…than I do right now. Getting stoned might make me care a little less about everything, and even if it did cause my critic to come crashing down on me, he’s doing that already, so what the fuck difference would it make if I actually opened up the door for him and welcomed him in he never takes himself out on other people like Persis’s does and if he did maybe I’d be a damn sight happier.

Huhhhhhhhhhhh……deep breath………





I can’t stop myself thinking about Onyx, my friend whom I referred to above who has been reading my posts and apparently…I’m nervous about characterizing her response since she may be reading…but I’ll say likes them or at least is moved to tell me that she…what?…experiences them in a light or way that I consider desirable…what a verbal workaround that was…anyway, I am a little too focused on her responses, so I think I’m going to have to ask her to both keep reading (though what am I going to do if she doesn’t) and also not to respond to me about the entries, because her responses end up becoming part of the fantasies that are involved in my writing them. It’s interesting how I’m now trying to turn my friends into my therapists where this is concerned. But I really am just getting the hang of this, figuring out how to present it as an idea to people I know, how to tell them that I would love for them to read, and might welcome an initial response if they’re so moved, but that the more they interact with me about it (or about anything, really) the more likely they’re going to be to turn up in it. Maybe some people might like that, but I can promise you that given my head (everyone’s really; I’m sort of I guess experiencing the projecting my bourgeois shock at the [asserted] universality of Freud’s assertions ideas) people aren’t going to want to interact with me all that much and so see themselves enmeshed in one of my sexual or violent fantasies that they can be reasonably sure other friends of mine (whom perhaps they know) are also reading. Perhaps if I just seal myself up in my room, only interacting with those people whose feelings I don’t care about, this blog would be a little purer. I certainly have (in principle) written myself into a corner where I must withdraw from my friends in order to keep this blog sanct, but then again, as I’ve mentioned before I think, I’ve withdrawn from them anyway, so what’s the harm?

I really got into my mastur…no, that’s not really accurate…I was going to say my masturbatory fantasies today with Reinhardt, and though that’s true, that’s not the thing that most turned me on. What did was something I’ve told you about, something that I articulated in the session today to a passionate ‘t’, almost getting myself (imagining that I was arousing Reinhardt too) aroused as I described the mechanism of my cerebral voyeurism which I find so irresistibly exciting, and which I hate to reproduce here since I just did it in her office this morning, but it’s had the effect of making me…and it also occurs to me that in case I don’t get it all in the allotted time that I can just continue writing, although I think in principle that the time limit is a good principle since it keeps me on the edge and from thinking too much about how I’m saying what I say. Anyway, so today with Reinhardt, I had a really exciting/fantasy/idea that arose from these…

Okay, you remember that time during one of the last sessions I had with you in your office, when I articulated what it’s like for me to talk with someone, especially a woman, and especially attractive women, but most importantly women that I am at all inclined to fantasize about…which is pretty much most women I would ever talk about sex with…anyway this mechanism where… Let’s say I’m having a conversation about sex with this fantasy woman, and in the course of this I say the word ‘vagina,’ or ‘clitoris’…‘clitoris’ is a good one, because it’s one of those practical unmentionables in polite society…in the society that I am generally talking about sex in…which is not to say that truly ‘polite’ society is open to frank sex convos, but there’s polite and there’s polite, and I mean the…not polite, but…mature, adult. Not sultry or…what’s the supreme court rule…lascivious, prurient… So when I say that word – ‘clitoris’ – I am excited by the fact that I imagine, simultaneously, that the woman to whom I have articulated ‘clitoris’, or ‘orgasm,’ must – must – simultaneously picture – picture – her own clitoris, her own orgasm – I’m a little disappointed here because I am not saying as well as I did off the cuff in ‘class’ today but rather it is dribbling out clumsily as I try to recapture what has already been said – that’s the problem with consciously trying…or not trying, but consciously reproducing something: it’s that you’re forced to trying to match it. Anyway. So I imagine my interlocutrix picturing her clitoris, her own orgasm, and by knowing that – because human beings don’t in my experience think in text, but in images – knowing that she has a picture in her mind of her clitoris, or herself having an orgasm (and by which I mean a solitary orgasm, not with a partner, or maybe with a partner, but she is only experiencing, picturing her orgasm, and not the presence of her partner), knowing that, I can read her mind, can also see her clitoris, can imagine what it would feel like, taste like, the moist, silky texture of it beneath my tongue – perhaps I should take a break here, because this is becoming a little self indulgent, and by break I mean…ha ha, anyway so she is picturing that, picturing herself having an orgasm, and so I am at the same time, both beknownst and unbeknownst to her – because whenever I am in these situations (not that it happens that often) whenever I am in these situations, I see upon mention of ‘clitoris’ or ‘vagina’ or ‘orgasm,’ [I see] in most women the merest withdrawal, the merest tensing up, as if closing the legs of the thought, so as not to let me see what it is she is seeing. But she cannot keep me out, because the word has been spoken, and you cannot unspeak it, cannot unpicture it, and because of that, I both get to make love to her to pleasure her to witness her pleasure both…with her permission, because she is there after all, talking to me – and I don’t just walk up to women and say ‘clitoris’…remember that thing about ‘polite’ – she is there talking to me about sex, but at the same time hiding from me, keeping what I desire from her out of the conversation (that is, she doesn’t say to me, “I am picturing my orgasm,” or “Here is what these words conjure in my mind.”), keeping me from her, and yet at the same time helplessly yielding to me – though I am very conscious of the implication of this last consideration, and want to emphasize that it is not the violence, the lack of will that excites me about it…it is not that I am seizing from her something that she does not wish to give me…it is that whether she wants to or not…well, I should refine that, because although the violence (implied) of the experience is not exciting to me…what is exciting…

(thinking)

…is the voluntariness of the fantasized act. That is, when I picture what I imagine she pictures, it is an act of will: her clitoris is there not as a result of force, but willingly, and her orgasm is desired. Though the imagined my experience of those images, the proxy presence of my presence-by-proxy to the act or experience, is not willed, it is neither unwilled. It simply is. And that is how I get, or imagine, some of my most exciting fantasies: by the mere mention of words to women who then cannot help picturing (by the very nature of understanding what I am saying they picture it) what I am saying, and because I know they are picturing it, I am present to their orgasm at the same moment they are and so, with the sole mere exception of the actual act, I am watching these women, that woman, masturbate and have…experience a delicious orgasm…with our eyes open and gazing into each other’s eyes – and that part is always real.

Huhhhhhhhhh…………………deep breath.

See, many times when I am writing like this, I want to get up and go masturbate because I find (like when I am working on my screenplay) it is distracting me from being able to see the characters and what they would do in a rational, true way; that instead, everyone becomes incredibly sexual and sexualized and all of their actions proceed primarily from my masturbatory fantasies instead of truth.

So then I get up and masturbate (I HATE THAT WORD! SO UGLY! Some other thoughts that I had in session today were about the association of my associations to that word (mechanical, metal, pounding, germanic, ugly)) to clear my head and in order to enable me to write better, to write more clearly from what the characters want instead of what I want.

But I find that here, in this context and in the context of this discussion in session, I don’t desire to clear my head, I don’t even desire to masturbate, but rather I desire simply to keep writing without end, and that to masturbate would be to short-circuit the process and expel involuntarily the feeling that I could otherwise put down on paper like an ant in amber.

(Onyx likes the way I end my paragraphs sometimes, and so it is difficult to keep from trying to end them with a pop, which in the very trying of which I shall, being human and subject to human fallibility when it comes to aesthetics, fail to do so. Just wanted to get that out.)

So no I don’t want to clear my head, nor to stop in five minutes (which as I said I may not do)…rather I want to keep going until I want to stop, until my conceptual wad has been shot, rather than my physical one, a much more predictable and fleeting experience.

So I had this idea as I was driving home, both aroused and not aroused, horny in a…what way?…not intellectual, maybe psychological, conceptual…having the desire to fantasize but not realize the fantasy (for reasons that I also got into in the session…fantasies being always (almost) perfect…and the experiences that result from fantasies almost never perfect and always by definition mundane and of the world…redundant…I’ll stick with of the world.)

So my thought is this.

I will put out a personal ad. In the Ecksville Weekly maybe. And it’s sort of based on this article that I read that someone turned me on to in Salon…here is the link…although perhaps when I go over this kind of thing from now on I will forego the presentation of the link and instead simply hypertext the word… like ‘article’. Here’s the link, anyway:

----------
(I leave blank while I’m writing…hmmm, conundrum…must go back and find out, so why not just hypertext). Anyway.

[Well, after all that, it turns out that the article is not free. It’s entitled, “What’s Up, Doc?” and it ran in the August 15, 2005, edition of the New York Observer. You can buy a peep here, by searching under the author’s name, Nina Roberts. Entirely worth the price of admission, IMHO.]

And this article…well, I don’t want to give it away, but let me say from the outset that I was inspired by it. And my ad says something like this. It is in the ‘For Women’ column…



Thinking… I feel like I cannot do this off the cuff. If I do, it will not have the requisite suaveness, so imagine that’s there and be kind to me in your thoughts…

“Ever imagined that someone is watching you? Ever wanted someone to watch you. Just to watch you and nothing else. I…

(There’s the bell…)

Ooh, now I’m embarrassed, not only am I spitting out without the requisite thought something whose tone I want to calibrate very carefully, but I am also doing it on my own time. I must really be desperate.

‘I will come to you, watch you pleasure yourself, I will remain clothed and will not touch you. I will follow your instructions about speaking. But I will offer this service – $50/hr – and I will hold it in the strictest confidence. I am interested in your fantasy, not mine…”

Well, let’s fuck the ad, and just get to how I imagine it unfolding…

A woman has contacted me, perhaps by email or snail mail first, and I have responded in kind, following her lead. We have a conversation over the phone before meeting, and once we do meet, it is in a place of her choice. Public or private. And she pays me up front. This is a service; no tit-for-tat here. And we talk for an hour perhaps. And I am cagey, but I am upfront about this. I want her to fantasize about who I might be, while not feeling the pressure or the hesitancy about what might happen if she were to touch me, or who I actually am. And of course I would want her to feel as comfortable as she would like to with who I am, that I am sincere in my not touching, in my remaining respectful, in wanting to follow her lead. And then, say in the next session, or later in that first one, we would go to her bedroom, and I would watch her masturbate. And I would tell her honestly (as much as she would like me to) how sexy she is, and how exciting it was to watch her, even as I stand firmly by my (but gently, warmly) by my intention to remain separate.

Is that really unfeasible? Take a gander at that article. What a way to augment the coffers, eh?

This has been like pulling teeth. On top of having my family over all last week it felt like…I don’t really feel like writing…well, like writing you. I mean I would like to. I enjoy this. I really regret that it’s ending because, as I’ve already mentioned, I value this forum and don’t really think that I’ll be able to duplicate it without you to write to for all of the reasons that I outlined last time I think. But I also am eager to get on to the next stage, to see what in fact it is like. And then there’s the money. I’m thinking of moving up to twice a week with Reinhardt, although this last session the other day gave me second thoughts. Perhaps the honeymoon is over.

Anyway, one thing I did want to do now, before we met on the…what? That Friday the 15th or whatever it is…16th maybe. Is to say that I think I would like to make this the last posting that you are expected to read insofar as I am paying you for it, and that maybe this is the point at which I give you the link to the blog and tell you that your letter or the session or whatever I’m calling it will be posted weekly as I have been writing you weekly (obviously sometimes it will not be on Sunday, like this week) and that I would love it if you felt moved to read your note (I still or at least for the time being will probably think of it as written to you) but that you no longer have to and that I don’t want to be on the clock for the time you spend reading it. That way, I can still have someone to write to, but I can also start to distance myself a little bit from you in advance of our meeting in a couple of weeks. (Not that I want to in my heart of hearts, you understand.)

Reinhardt is hitting me over the head with how much I am…well, it all comes down to how much I want to be liked, and how much she (as the therapist) figures in my web of social anxiety that I realized in the aforementioned last session was not as extensive as I thought it was, and that (which I also realized) I really do put my therapist in a special position when it comes to feeling anxiety about being liked. I don’t…I tried to make the case to Reinhardt that it was the condition of my existence, but then I realized that I don’t worry so much about what I say to most people in my life…although the truth is also that I don’t say to most people the things I say to my therapist.

Anyway, so she’s doing something that you never did, and which I called her on, and which I’m feeling conflicted about because I don’t know…well, there was a moment in the session on Wednesday when I started to launch into one of my sidebars on what I was feeling (anxiety about what I was talking about because I was talking about it in front of her)…specifically, I was talking about…uck, and this is something that all of a sudden I’m aware of a larger audience…I…well, I…I don’t want to say “hit,” because that brings up all sorts of…Persis got me really mad the other night, and I happened to have just taken off my socks, and I swiped her with the limp cock [!!! This was not at all intentional. I meant to write ‘sock,’ and I did not know until reviewing that this is how it came out. Too perfect to ascribe to poor typesmanship.] as an aggressive gesture, and the first swipe (I am tempted to say “blow”…it is almost as if I desire to bring down the calumny of the world upon me…this is not a first, I often find myself phrasing things…well, not often, but it has happened…in such a way as to sound (almost subconsciously) worse, more of an evil person than I actually am)…anyway, the first swipe of the sock was ineffective, so I did it again, and this time it whipped a little across her face and…I was kind of behind her…that doesn’t sound very good either, I guess…and it caught her in the eye…and I am as sure as I am that it hurt as I am that her reaction was exaggerated…anyway, I was telling Reinhardt about this, and I was very conscious of her being a woman, and what she must feel as a woman about domestic violence, blah blah blah, and so I started to hem and haw about feeling particularly self-conscious about telling her about this when she told me with a little bit of peeve in her voice that I should just stay with the feeling…something like that. And I went on because…you know, I know exactly what she’s talking about; it must be incredibly frustrating sometimes to be on the receiving end of my disquisitions in which what I am feeling about…what…disquesting?…I don’t know…figures as prominently if not more so as the thing I am supposedly narrating. Anyway, so I got her point and I continued on. But then I had to go back and kind of scold her for having done that…and what I wanted to say…ack, I can hardly voice this to you…

[Joel [haughtily]:] You know, I know what you were talking about, but…well, let me just tell you that Garth Goldberg, who is an expert psychoanalyst, would never have done that, and as you learn to be an analyst, you might remember this moment and learn that you shouldn’t do that.

Well, that was the feeling…but on the other hand, I also feel like I cannot. Ever. Get. Out. Of. My. Head. And so to have someone just say, “Shut up, go back to what you were saying, and don’t bother me with the reflexive commentary,” was actually helpful in terms of me voicing what it was I was there to voice: the feelings that I had during and around the sock incident.

And so that started me thinking, “Well, maybe Goldberg is just too indulgent. Maybe he should have – throughout those nine plus years – been knocking me out of my head and telling me over and over that my endless commentary was ultimately about my desire to please him, which was important to observe but ultimately irrelevant to the therapy…although it can’t have been irrelevant, since pointing that out is one of the essential steps in my learning to mitigate my endless selfsecondguessing when speaking to others.

And now I’m lost in the whole episode again. As I write about it I get all tied up in whether…or which pole is the “right” one: the “Just stay with the feeling” pole, or the other one, the Goldberg one, the “Let ‘em wander around helplessly in their own heads until they get sick of being in there” pole. See, because the get-sick-of-being-in-there point never comes for me. My head is safe. And if I were ever going to be moved to get out of it, it would have happened already. And yet being in my head is one of the most productive…is my central productive neurosis…I don’t know…I’m not thinking very carefully about what I’m writing…see, there I go again. I worry that you will feel that the words I am using are turgid, above my station, illconceived, and pretentious, and that you will not like me. So I insert that little thing about not choosing my words so as to excuse the thought, to banish the thought that I am afraid you will have by observing that I too have that same thought, that I am aware that that thought might be had by someone listening to me; and so to prevent you, to keep you from ceasing to like me for my poor communication skills, from ceasing to pity the poor guy who just wants to sound knowledgeable by coming up with a meaningless phrase like “my central productive neurosis.” What the hell does that mean? I am ashamed for not having come up with something crisper. Even though that is the point of this stream of consciousness format.

Anyway, I’m tied up in knots. I’m stuck with this therapist whom I’ve liked and am now doubting, whom I’m thinking of seeing more than once a week, and who I am worrying about if she will actually help me or if I am just diddling in my head.

I like therapy. As I’ve said many times before. And that is what worries me. I would go every day if time and money permitted. Because I love hearing myself talk and feeling like I’m making connections. But what does it all really do for me? I don’t know. It keeps me sane, maybe…and I should clarify what I mean by that, because “sane” is an awfully flip way of talking about the value that I get out of therapy.

I feel like therapy is an exhaust valve, a pressure release valve, that enables me to get out the stuff that I need to in order not to explode. You know what I mean. But it’s an awfully dear way to go about that, no? I could play basketball for free. I could go to synagogue more often. Why do I enjoy this particular route toward inner peace? (“Inner peace.” Just shoot me now.) I think it’s because of the intellectual component. Here’s an opportunity for me to endow a nameless faceless person (figuratively speaking) with intellectual prowess and then to attempt to please that person with my intellectual prowess.




Hmm.





There it is.










That’s depressing.




How can I get out of this loop of having to earn the approval of someone whose intellect I pedestalize[, which approval I must earn] by my own display of pseudointellect--

I also devalue the efforts that I make to display my intellect.

These are these moments when I think I should be an academic. Because that’s what everyone is doing in academia: endowing people (or denying people) with intellectual prowess and then trying to impress them (or writing them off). I’m just talking out of my ass now. It’s late. I have fifteen minutes to go, and we’re leaving tomorrow for Persis’s brother’s wedding in Boston.

Let me take a minute to get you the link.

No, I’ll email it subsequently, because I might change the address this evening.

Anyway, I’m not liking myself much tonight. Not in a condemnatory way, really; I just think I’m a little pitiful. The intellectual equivalent of the guys I would see walking out of the video store (you know it probably: Odyssey Video. I used to work there. I had my first real job there. And this was before all these newfangled delivery services, before DVDs, etc., when the video store…before Blockbuster even…when the video store was like movie central. And these squat lonelylooking middle aged men would come in and rent, like, six pornos at a time and …if I remember correctly, bring them back the next day. I mean, what the hell did they do with these movies, watch them all night and all day? Can you imagine? Anyway, I always thought they were kind of pitiful, in a sad, not a contemptuous, way. And I feel like I am always…I feel like I am the same guy from an intellectual standpoint. Unfulfilled, unstimulated, trying to create this environment around myself of intellectual whatever and then trying to show off to it. It really is like masturbating to porn.

I’ve stopped taking my Wellbutrin because it’s been giving me these nasty (at least I think it’s the Wellbutrin; I’m determined to figure it out by using myself as a guinea pig) side effects…nasty is probably the wrong word…just really…they’ve been around for a while now, and I’m starting to realize that the effect…it’s referred to as “brain zap” in online communities, and I have no idea what the scientific term for it is. I doubt there is one, because my psychiatrist didn’t really understand what it was I was…anyway, between 3 and 7 pm is when it’s worst, and whenever I move my eyes to the right I get this sudden jolt of electricity blow[ing] out my peripheral nervous system, out my ear, to my hand, to my foot, more prominent on the left side, and not very pleasant at all. So I’m stopping the Wellbutrin and trying to determine if that’s what’s causing it. I’ve experienced it before on my maintenance dose of Effexor, and if it doesn’t go away in about 10 days, I’m going to go back on the Wellbutrin and start phasing myself off the Effexor. I don’t want to live long term with this shit. It’s not fun.

Why I am telling you all this? Because you’re my friend, right? And I tell friends whom I haven’t talked to in a while about what’s going on with my life. Blah blah blah. I wish there was a way I could continue to communicate with you.




What now?


Five minutes.


Anyway, I’ll email you the link, but I won’t be emailing you these postings anymore. And also, I’ll…well, I don’t really think you need that…I was going to say, I’ll email you the file that I…in which I keep track of the substitutions that I make so I stay consistent. But you don’t need that. You’ll figure it out. Of course, you’ll probably never look at it, so what difference does it make…the blog I mean…you won’t look at the blog.

Things with Persis are okay, except she’s taking advantage of the fact that I’m off one of my antidepressants to blame all of my outbursts on the fact that I’m off it. And that just gets me going louder. Like teasing a fenced up dog.

Burt is amazing. But I wish he’d grow up already so I can have my life back.

My office is a mess.

I’m killing time here.

What am I avoiding?

(I look back to see where I started talking about irrelevancies…)

The intellect stuff. I just don’t know where to go with it. I don’t think, without a substantial change in my life, that it’s going to resolve itself, that that part of myself is going to be satisfied.

And the being in my head thing. Only pot was good at fixing that, and I can’t smoke pot anymore because it doesn’t work for me in the same way as it used to.

I hate the fact that I look back so often on earlier years and wish that I could go back and experience the carefreeness of them. So clichéd. And I’m only 35.

Happy birthday on Sunday. That’s the bell…