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 Certainly, there is a touch of the square about me: withdrawn, not particularly emotive (though that hasn’t always been true)…(though I feel that except around Burt for whom I make a special effort, my affect is often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.]