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.