This past Wednesday, Persis and I – at a low point of relations – finally had one of those one-on-one “therapy” sessions that I’ve told you about, where we would act as if we were in couple’s therapy but just try to do it without the shrink. It was Persis’s invention, because she says that she doesn’t want to spend the money if she doesn’t have to, and though I was initially skeptical (and remain so for what ails us) the…those “sessions” have nonetheless been helpful in getting us to at least see eye to eye about what gripes we have. That’s something. It’s funny how those sessions kind of parallel these “sessions,” in that they wouldn’t probably pass muster as proper “therapy” but they are nonetheless helpful in their own right. Anyway, I don’t think that we will be able to get past what is in our way through those sessions – and that was my overarching message on Wednesday night – but they are…it did nonetheless contribute to a detente, a softening that has at least made living together easier. Specifically, I feel like what is in our way is the fact that I am going through a sea change in terms of my relationship to my professional self, which is, insofar as it is calling into question those fanta--…

Burt has awakened, and if Persis is unable to get him back to sleep I will have to interrupt and go do so. I wouldn’t mind actually. I could stand a few z’s.

Anyway, those fantasies. Those narcissistic (although I’m starting to distrust my own wielding of that term; sounds like psychobabble of the kind that is supposed to stand for something but in reality stands for nothing) fantasies that have determined my career up to now. I am learning that I am not the Messiah; and that that knowledge, that new knowledge, that new conception of myself has implications for how I conduct my relationships, what I believe I can take, should put up with, etc. I’ve been through this before. So I’m coming to a point because of all that where I am not willing to tolerate as much as I perhaps once was, especially as I now (as I mentioned at some length last week) question…or believe that a relationship that would actually be psychologically harmful to me would not be worth staying in for Burt’s sake, because what good to him is a fucked up dad? So Persis’s “quirks”, her damage, which she maintains is garden variety and I maintain is serious…and she cites her current superior…this bears some repeating, even though I’ve already repeated it with Reinhardt and so it feels a little stale. But it is an important distinction, and I would like you to know it also.

So I proposed this analogy… First you have to know that the other side of my gripe, my feeling that I am coming to a point where Persis’s baggage is not something I am just willing to take, or that I trust her to “work on” on her own; which is all to say that I think she…at a certain point, I won’t be able to justify continuing to just tolerate her shit without her being in therapy, because I don’t think she’s going to get at it any other way. But her side to that discussion, the thing that she needs from me and without which her abidance in the relationship would be thrown into question is to control my “outbursts,” my “cruelty,” which I put in quotes because those are words that she has used but which she has defined rather murkily and which ultimately I think boil down to my pointing out those things about her that I am not willing to tolerate forever. [In other words, her definition of my cruelty is such that I am always being cruel whenever I point those things out…which effectively means that I cannot ever point those things out without being discounted as cruel.]

So back to this analogy. I suggested that – and I did not claim to have this down pat in the sense that it is a rough edged analogy – she was on a treadmill, facing the wrong way. Or rather, she was looking out at a beautiful view (and which view interestingly enough – and I have not articulated this before in my retelling of it – I have associated with the view from the hospital window as Persis was giving birth to Burt), but in fact the treadmill was carrying her backward to a big black abyss. And the abyss I let remain undefined – psychological breakdown, the end of our relationship, some sort of crisis in any case, but I didn’t and don’t think it’s useful to define it too specifically – but I suggested that I was not on the treadmill (for the purposes of my analogy – another fact that I have not really recognized before) and I was waving to her, warning her to turn around and look at the abyss so that she could get off the treadmill. And she saying, “Stop yelling so loudly, stop berating me! Can’t you see that there is no abyss; there’s only this beautiful view?” Which of course was because she was simply looking the other way…and what she has termed my outbursts and my cruelty (falling under the general heading of my anger) were in fact my intensifying warning about the abyss. That’s fairly true to how I experience our relationship: the outbursts and cruelty are in fact efforts to get her to recognize, pay attention to things about our relationship that I view as…what?…treacherous, perilous…issues, and her refusal to…well, not only her refusal to do so but her couching, accusing me of simply being angry or negative or cruel or out of control or in a bad mood whenever one of these things comes up. Anyway, so of course she said after I talked about this for a little bit, “But the thing is that there isn’t any abyss, and I’m not facing the wrong way.” Which brought us again back to our starting point. But one of the important moments in the discussion for me was that she compared the two of us and said that she was far more functional, well adjusted, together than I was, and that that was evidence that I was sick or disturbed or whatever and that she was in fact together and not in need of therapy but to me this just went back to what I was saying before: in the analogy, that she was simply enjoying the view from her perspective. But that ultimately I was the one who was more in touch with reality, even if a bleak one; and so who really was more together? I don’t think Persis has it in her to look darkness in the face the way I do. Maybe I’m just…maybe that’s just my…narcissism?…talking, but… Her family is so much about appearances. This reminds me of another time I was wondering about what she would…

It was in these telesessions, and I was wondering whether Persis would…yes, whether she would be able to withstand the death of her illusions about our relationship or whether that would be…whether in order not to experience the death of those illusions she would turn and run. This is I think one of the possible consequences of an upbringing like hers, in which her family…and again…or not again, but I can’t really claim to be an expert on her family…this is just what I’ve garnered. Her family’s valuing of form over function in relationships does lead to an emphasis on the surface, the appearances of things, rather than their essence. And in order to preserve that surface, who knows how she might resist a challenge to the primacy of surfaces? If she senses that I am trying to get her to look past the surface of herself and into the bowels, she might really be running not so much from (although she might well be running from this) what lies within her as from an assault on that way of seeing the world. Who knows? I just know that I think there is only so much goodwill and mutual understanding that is available through this do-it-yourself therapy, and that at a certain point someone will have to intervene.

She cites her current professional success as evidence that all is well. Whereas to me, not only her current success (in the manner in which she has succeeded) but also the fact that she would cite that success as that kind of evidence suggests that she is still clinging to the fantasies that I am trying to get out of the clutches of…because certainly, those fantasies aren’t at every moment destructive.

And then there’s Sanaa Hamri, and Brokeback Mountain. Somehow Sanaa Hamri…fuck, I hate when I have to give you backstory. Why can’t you just be in my head knowing who all these people are?

Africa. Daughter of the dorm mother, [Sanaa was] at Sarah Lawrence when I was in Africa, a couple of years behind me [in college]. Have regarded her all this time as my inferior simply because she was younger than I was in 1992-3 and still in college…I wrote Blanca, the dorm mother, for the first time in a while, and she writes back that Sanaa is directing her…has directed her first movie. And I figure that it’s some sort of little nothing. But in fact it’s this huge film that she’s come to by way of directing music videos. Part of me feels like, “Oh well, she got there a different way,” but part of me is like, “Oh you little piece of shit. You really are a failure,” and is really really hoping that the movie is stupid. It could very well be stupid (I saw the preview while watching Brokeback Mountain, which almost made me not be able to focus on the movie), but it also could be smart. Anyway, seeing Brokeback Mountain made me realize how much I want to return to directing, made me remember that the writing was just a means to get there, and what if I’ve chosen the wrong means, bet all my eggs on succeeding first in this one way when I should have stuck with editing? Oh, hindsight. I jump out twenty feet and see myself sitting, fat, in this chair and I feel like…oh, all the rest of those fucking could-have-beens out there. And watching movies makes the thoughts turn in my head again and reminds me that the only thing I’ve lacked is opportunity, and that what I’ve lacked in finding opportunity is…I don’t know…drive? Willingness to do work I don’t believe in? Maybe that’s self-aggrandizing: “I’m just too good for the work that I would have had to have done to get where I wanted to be.” In any case, it hasn’t happened. And every time I watch a movie the potential still turns in me like a sleeping monster. But perhaps lots of people have the potential. I remember during Tzara my mom watched me directing and said that I was born to do that, and that has stuck in my head like… Well, what was she going to say? “Yeah, you’re just okay at this. Don’t give up your day job.”? She was my mom. Is. But I believed, believe her. I really feel, I feel, and maybe it’s just wishful thinking, but I feel like the last chapter of this hasn’t been written. That’s the only thing I can allow myself to feel without being terrified of the lost promise. But then I go to: How many people in this world are sitting around consoling themselves with the promise of what will never be? A whole fucking lot. That’s what a pipe dream is, no? “One of these days, when I get my…I’m going to…” I want to say that this is more than “one of these days”; this is a feeling that won’t go away. Aw, but now I’m just playing with words, part of me wants to say. But when I sit in the theater… A part of me comes alive, a part of me that will not, cannot be killed, and that is quietly sitting there, knowing that its time will come, insisting that it be given an opening. I want to believe in this; right now it is the only thing I have to believe in. But I also want to embrace truth and sometimes it feels like those two are mutually exclusive.

I want this tension between the potential and the actual to end.

I’m trying to finish my real estate homework. It feels weird to have homework. My math skills are not what they used to be. I probably am not in as good shape as I used to be. I’m concerned about my blood pressure. I’m afraid of a lot of things, including, now, after today, that my marriage is actually harmful to my psychological health. This puts everything in a different perspective. I have always thought of staying in a relationship as a matter of endurance or/and determination. That is, if one were strong enough, that one could stay in any relationship; I have never, however, considered that there might be harmful consequences to the individual in doing so. This sounds pretty fucking stupid given how much of an issue, a visible one, domestic violence has become in my lifetime. But I have never really considered myself to be one of those people who has that kind of relationship…or rather, said better, I have never considered myself to be one of those types of people. Should clarify something: nothing has happened today that has not happened before, and nothing is worse today than, say, last year…except perhaps my brain chemistry (which is the sinister ghost, marionetteer, lurking behind everything I write). Rather…well, at this point I should probably say that I got high at 11am and figured I would be sober by 2pm when Persis got home and when I was supposed to come up and write this. But here it is, 4:40, and I still sort of feel the afterglow. But the big insight while…or one of them…everything feels like an insight, isn’t that wonderful?…to experience I mean. To not worry that what one is thinking is stupid, even if perhaps it is? But it occurred to me that this mantra I have of sticking with the relationship and making the bed that I have slept in and taking a long view at this point of what is good for my child and valuing that over what is good for me…that that would actually have consequences, bad consequences for me. Or not ‘would,’ but ‘could.’ And that changes the terms of things dramatically. For example, and I feel kind of stupid for not… for this not having occurred to me before. Just a moment; it is…I mean, I remember trying to put myself in dad’s shoes and perhaps unspokenly thinking that he left when he could just as…perhaps not just as easily, but just as possibly, stayed…and thought that…well, I remember…I have always framed this in such terms that dad, in my imagination, would have certainly suffered pain and trial and loss of pride, whatever. But that none of this in my calculation – or in any case, nothing in my calculation – was, or could have been actually harmful to him, and I don’t mean physically here, which is one of the things that makes the calculation a little more vague. Certainly…and even the idea of psychological abuse…I don’t really know what that means concretely, and I remember that the one time I tried to suggest that I was the victim of psychological abuse – this I think was in your old office – you, like, I remember you kind of shut me down. I remember you asking me specifically, or it felt like forcing me to be specific, to name the particular blow that was struck, whereas I have all along wondered whether a relationship could amount to an abusive one without any single blow being struck but instead by virtue of the culture that obtained in that relationship, that the relationship could be abusive because of what it brought out in the participants, rather than because of precisely one particular, or a set of concrete things that one participant brought to bear on the other. I don’t know. I just know that it never occurred to me that, had dad stayed, that the relationship that would have evolved out of the decision to move forward would have been an abusive, or perhaps a better word is a pejorative, one. That either dad or my mom would have died spiritually in some (or both) critical way. And that if I look at my marriage and think what if it is that, that the whole idea of staying for the sake of Burt kind of becomes sort of silly. I need to make a distinction here: this is not saying, agreeing, with the popular wisdom that a relationship without love is not a good environment for the child. Perhaps a marriage such as the one I am describing would have love, but still be destructive to the principals…that’s not a difficult thing to imagine at all. We’ve all had those relationships, right? Even though…No. What I mean to say is that…I mean, I’m not trying to hold my relationship with Persis up as that kind of relationship. It’s hard to find the love here right now. But…anyway, I think it’s more and less than a loving relationship that provides a good environment for a child. I don’t know what that would be, but I…I think about Fiddler on the Roof and the “Do You Love Me?” song, and then I jump to the wisdom of arranged marriages, and to the dizzying number of options technology and wealth have brought to us and our relationships. And even as I stand even for a broadening of what is available in terms of relationships, I bemoan the fact that I don’t live in a feudal society, a shtetl, a culture in which I would just have to suck it up and deal. Because that would make one of the questions in my life a lot easier. Of course, I am equally aware that focusing my discontent on my relationship may be a very efficient evasion of what is really going on. Witness the smoothness of our relationship when things are going well. That has always been the case, and our relationship has always gone poorly when things are not going well. And things are not going well. And now I’m actually not talking about my relationship but instead about me, my life. (Get out the violins, the fucker’s about to gripe about his life again.) Yesterday I sat down at the Beer Garden and had three beers over the course of a couple of hours when I…during which I finished The Surrender and tried to come up with an ending for the script, failed again (or took another step in failing), and felt frustrated at the end [of my third beer] that I was not letting myself just write up to it, especially now that I feel like I have the substance of a second act in my head. That impulse scares me, because I know how it always leads me not to a breakthrough, but along a long, long winding path at the end of which lies the same wall I’m trying to get over now. It’s like taking another several months to go around in what I know to be a big circle. And I’m starting to really feel like… Somehow that moment in therapy…I’ve forgotten…oh yes, I did write about it: the Reinhardt-crying-because-I-was-forcing-myself-to-do-what-I-don’t-want-to-do moment. I was confused because yesterday as I tried to clear my head to move forward in the story I wrote about how The General, that voice that I’ve started I think to distinguish in my thinking – and come to think of it, it’s easy to see how a child might between those two voices cower in fear of moving forward and yet be entirely unable to retreat. It’s like my road in life is this…battle, and The Critic is the one shelling the bunkers and The General is the one who is ordering the soldier (the physical me) to advance. And I am caught between the two. Of course, it is not a perfectly apt comparison because however devastating The Critic is he will not kill me. But of course we are talking now of psychological realities, and in that sense I am clearly afraid that he will.

So where was I?


Anyway, yesterday, after that time in the Beer Garden. I really started thinking about how good it would feel to just give up. I remember during the last time in my life that I went through this I was training for the marathon, for the same reason…or to compensate for a similar situation as I find myself in now: feeling the dream to be dissolving and out of reach. And at a certain point when I felt like I was not going to make my goal, I considered quitting training for the marathon. I remember this pretty clearly, I remember the particular hill run that put me in this place. And I considered not running it to try and break myself of the habit of goal setting, compulsive goal setting, that had brought me to that particular place in life where all of my goals felt out of reach and I felt like a failure. Thinking that maybe if I broke myself of the spell of having to finish what I started that I would no longer feel the compulsion to do so, and that I could go through my life satisfied with what I was able to achieve and not sweating that which I wasn’t. That felt like a very bleak time, I remember. This was 1994, I think; yes, because I came back from Africa in 1993 and the marathon was March 1994. And I didn’t get a break until the end of that year when…is this right? Yes, when Virtual Reality started. And then that summer I dawdled, wrote for…it wasn’t long. Four weeks to finish the script, right? Because at that point I had already…ah, it comes back to me. Being in New York after the show wrapped, waiting to hear on the verdict for the following season, hammering out the story to the food script, then going home and writing in Delicia’s apartment, five pages a day, twenty-five a week, a hundred in four weeks, even as I was in the writer’s group… So even projecting…or I mean, by projecting back to that bleak time, that moment where I considered not running the marathon because of who I felt I was condemned, cursed to be, and ready, almost, though fearful and in despair, ready almost to make a decision that I thought could break that spell. But instead pushing forward and finishing the marathon, even though I had to walk through the end of it, finishing it, and though I wanted to…though I regretted that, I found pride in it and vowed to do better the next time. I still carry my poor time with me, but not as a mark of shame really, although I do remember the scoff that Darren Leib gave me when I told him 4 hours and 44 minutes. Perhaps that is a whisper of the truth that it holds for me. But it is not something that pains me, like the Ivy League or the singing group.

But not finishing this script, the idea not even that it will not be as good as I hope it will, but that I will not finish it. And that I will accept that failure as the end of my efforts at writing for a visual medium. That I am afraid of, even if I posit that out of this darkness here there will arise something yet, something that I can be proud of. I feel like every time in my life I have relied on such a development it has failed to appear, but that every time I have been sure that it would not, it has. I had no inkling at the time of the marathon of what awaited me two and a half years later, with the beginning of All Hands. Two and a half years. To think that…I mean, that’s almost the time it would take to go through law school…barf. But I want to believe that that might yet…or that some victory, triumph may yet arise from the ashes of (violins, please) my life.

My room is a mess. I wonder whether I allow it to stay a mess in order to not fully occupy Ecksville. I tell myself that I do not have time to clean it, that I must finish this script. But that’s such a big fucking lie. That excuse doesn’t keep me from masturbating, or watching movies at night. There’s always… I feel like I need to take a break, though. Even as I feel like I must make some progress, must give myself some…some concrete goal. That is something that the pages would be good for. Introducing a concrete goal. The outline. I’m afraid of not being able to see this far. But I’m…I have been immobilized, and surely writing seventy-five to ninety pages of misguided something is better than awaiting a clarity that never comes?

A deep burning pain in my solar plexus. I say pain, but I don’t mean, like, I’ve been stabbed…it’s just this tension, this electric warmth (and not a good one) that radiates out from my solar plexus into my stomach, indicating that something is very, very wrong. What’s wrong, though, is everything. Everything. Not one thing is right, except my list of financial accounts, which I have just spent the better part of…I don’t know…two hours…no, not that much, obsessing over, as I always do when there is work to be done. As long as things are not in order I have an excuse to not write…but not just to not write but to not do anything that will give me some sense of accomplishment. All it takes is a little disorder, and I look for disorder like a starving cat looks for mice. I crave it so that I can spend time eradicating it so that I don’t have to do anything that has any stakes whatsoever. Order has no stakes because it is certain to dissolve. There can be no stakes where there is a certainty of…what?…order just disappearing. You put it in…bring it to bear on a situation and you go away for a day and then it’s gone. And it’s not like it might still be there. You know it’s going to be gone. And so I make this big thing over imposing order so that I can spend all this time every day redoing what the passage of the day has innocently, without rancor or malice, undone. And thus my life goes to shit, having accomplished nothing but the installment of temporary conveniences with the hope that they will…you know what I mean.

But it’s not just convenience. This quiet burning in my solar plexus tells me that everything is not in order, that chaos is out there, waiting to come in. I have started really freaking out when Burt makes a mess, or vomits. The other night I blew my top…well, the night before Burt vomited, and it made me quietly crazy, but Persis just kept haranguing me about blah blah, I--…I don’t know…I ate his carrot cake…it was a weird situation…I wasn’t feeling too right in the head, maybe because of my Wellbutrin. I don’t trust that shit anymore, and I am stopping taking it for good. Except…Okay here’s where I really get compulsive. I have put … I have been on this long re-experiment to see whether Wellbutrin was causing the brain zap side effect I was having for a long time and which became quietly intolerable. It was correlating with a period in the afternoon when I got kind of tired and really grumpy, and I thought my mood was not being helped by the fact that I had this side effect going on. So I started this experiment where I stopped taking Wellbutrin and kept a diary and tried to determine what was… And it turns out that I stopped taking the Wellbutrin and the brain zap stops. And during this time, I also discover that raising my Neurontin dose and taking it three times a day was really helping. Experiment over? No. Because like any good scientist I had to test my theory by trying to see if I could make the side effect reappear. So it has become very important to me to start taking the Neurontin again. I mean the Wellbutrin. But here’s the thing. I start taking it again, and three days later I’m starting to get dry mouth (which was another symptom that correlated with the brain zap), and so I’m thinking, “Ah, so there’s the Wellbutrin doing it’s thing,” and as it happened I had a choir audition (this is a new thing, about which more later), and I didn’t want to have dry mouth when, while I was trying to sing. So I stop taking the Wellbutrin. My dry mouth goes away. I sing fine. I get in the choir. But then I’m like, “Well I’m still not sure that the Wellbutrin was causing the brain zap,”…and get this: I’ve already…I have this pill box that allows me to set aside two weeks' worth of pills at one time. And I take several supplements, so it’s worth it to me to put them all in their two weeks’ worth of boxes every other Sunday so that I have them for the next two weeks and don’t have to think about them. Well, the last time I did this, I had budgeted in my distribution of pills my starting Wellbutrin again so that I had put the pills in the boxes. And here’s the thing: I feel pressure to take the Wellbutrin simply because I have put them in the boxes. It is very hard for me psychologically to just take the fucking pills out of the box and throw them away. And on top of it all, after I get in to the choir and figure it’s not such a big deal if I have dry mouth if it’s going to solve the riddle of the brain zap for me (I’ve become more obsessed with the experiment than concerned with whether the medication is doing me any good)…and so I start the Wellbutrin again a couple of days ago…and within a couple of days, no brain zap, no dry mouth. But I do have this peculiar resurgence of irritability and depression. Now, here’s what you should be thinking, Dr. Goldberg: “Why the fuck – since you were doing fine-ish without the Wellbutrin – why the fuck don’t you just quit taking the fucking medication???” “Because, you see…don’t you see? I’ve put the pills in the boxes. And I want to make them neatly disappear, as I have planned. I have planned out for my taking them, and I want to take them. I can’t put them in their bottles again, or throw them out, because that’s not what I have planned.”

Maybe that’s the issue. I feel like nothing has gone as I have planned in my life right now. You know, ordinarily I look back at my life and I see the choices that I’ve made and the role that fate has played in them and I think that fate and I are, have been working in synch – even when fate deals me a curve ball – to get me to a place that I want to be. But now I look at myself and I see that exactly the opposite is true: fate and I have been working together to run me into a ditch. It’s like, I’ve been trying to attain these things and I have made choices, and fate has, you know, pushed me around, and now I’m like this walking gutterball. I do see it as a kind of sine wave. I was talking to Ryan Speck – we were stoned – and talking about the…makeup of the universe – and I told him that, articulated to him that I knew intellectually that I would probably again at some point be in a place of…what?…pride…good feeling…about my life, that there was a rise and fall to my perspective, and that right now I was in the trough of the wave. But I just can’t see the other side, can’t imagine what it will look like right now. I think intellectually that I am taking time to raise my son, an experience that very few men have (though increasingly more), an uncommon experience that is, one that I should (could) be proud of. But I’m not. I look at how I essentially gave up a career to do this, and now the editing path I was on is looking very good. Looking like at least I would have been somewhere where I was doing creative things, making some money. And now? Zippo. Nada. No contribution to society except keeping a little tot from breaking his head open, or wallowing in his own shit.

To give you an example of my mood, yesterday Burt and I were driving him to day care, and he…he’s been saying periodically, “Bye-bye daddy,” out of nowhere. In a faraway voice, one devoid of emotion. As if…and here we go…he was looking into the future, knowing that he was not just going out of the house, but out of this world. Or I was. As if he was an oracle speaking through the body of my son. And yesterday we’re in the car and he goes, like…in a very concerned way he says, “No freeway. No freeway.” And I mean he said it like he was concerned, scared of going on the freeway. And this was in proximity to him saying out of the blue, “Bye-bye, daddy.” So all of a sudden I’m thinking that he is presaging a death of one or the other of us in a freeway accident, and that I need to be ca--…I’m like, “How can I avoid ever going on the freeway with him in the car again?”

I think about what if Burt were to be killed, and it’s just like, why don’t you rip my guts out because I would just want to leave my life and go somewhere empty and quiet for a long long time and rebuild every element from scratch because without him, with the memory of him and not him…

This is the kind of thing I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about. Things are not well. I know I will not kill myself, but I wish that I could… Not really, I just picture it. I picture leaving Persis. I wish Burt wasn’t in the picture. I see…Reinhardt…I talked about a new voice yesterday, one separate from The Critic that I isolated, distinguished in your office. This one was The General, the part of my head that says, “You will do this, soldier, you will crawl through the muck and over that wall!” And that that appears to be the source of a lot of my compulsions; for example, my wanting to eat foods that I don’t like so that I don’t have to experience myself as having limits. And maybe even the pills thing, I don’t know. But basically this General has…

Reinhardt, in a classic non-Goldberg move, stopped me and said that she was listening to me (this is how I w--…while I was talking about the food compulsion and my desire, need, drive to get over these metaphorical walls that I see so as to, you know, the thing about limits: I am the Messiah, I am Superman, and I have no limits…(It even goes beyond that… Anyway…)) talk and essentially say that I was forcing myself to do what I didn’t want to do and that it made her very sad and that she felt like she wanted to cry. (It’s fascinating the way she really brings her responses to me to bear. I don’t understand it, I’m afraid of it, it makes me feel like…and this comes up in the way we have decided to move towards…gulp…four times a week (aren’t you proud of me?)) And I realized that the…my staying with Persis has, was from the beginning…I was, like, challenging myself to find…I’m having difficulty with this, imagining her reading it, and it breaks my heart to write it, but-- Persis…there are things that I cannot tell you because the forum…there are people involved who do not deserve to have their confidences broken. So I will just say this: Persis was a challenge, always has been. There are qualities about her that I think would drive the average person away, taking her as a whole. But I am not the average person. I am the Messiah. I am Superman. I was sent here to heal, to take what the average mortal cannot take. And so I have justified staying with Persis. Because she is more than a mere mortal can take, and my taking, my being with her, my…I am the Bodhisattva, who holds back from Nirvana to bring others from [to] enlightenment. That is why I am with her; because I am her only prayer for enlightenment. Because I was not going to be fazed by those qualities that…I was waiting for something that was the last straw. I was always waiting for the thing that would drive me away from her like…kryptonite to Superman. And it never came. There were all these…things, qualities. But no kryptonite. So my staying in this relationship has been justified by the myth I’ve had about myself that is being severely challenged by my professional and personal circumstances. I am starting…I was…this was the night that I lost it. (I even said, with murder in my voice, to Persis: “If Burt vomits, I’m leaving the room.”) I won’t waste time describing the situation, just take my word for it. And I came upstairs and looked at the golden globe winners and saw george Clooney there and realized, fat me, that I would never be george clooney. I would never be steven spielberg. And in this moment, these few hours of…I don’t know…chemical chaos (because that’s what it felt like in retrospect), where my defenses were down, and the brutal reality of now, right now, came crasuhing in (sic; I wrote that word as I was simultaneously trying to…alternating between ‘crushing’ and ‘crashing’), I realized that the fantasy that I have had about who I would be in the future, the medium term future was basically dead. That I was no one but me and that I would never be anyone but me, and that all this sitting in my office after a good writing hour imagining my oscar acceptance speech was a sad, sad form of psychosis, and that I wasn’t going to get anywhere near that world, where I would be discovered and in demand, and that my time editing was probably that glint of it that I got, the only one that I will ever get, and that I was flung from that world like a satellite would be from the gravitational pull of…you know when the shuttles use the gravitational pull of jupiter to launch itself further out into the solar system… That. That my closeness, proximity to that world has flung me ever further from it, and now I will never return, I will always be one of those people who looks on from his laptop and looks at george clooney and fantasizes about how it could have all been different if only I hadn’t married Persis, hadn’t moved in with her.

And those few hours were not happy ones. I--…it’s hard to explain how I felt because it was one of those moments where I was, like the circle in Flatland, popped briefly up into another dimension, a horrible one, where I could see the world as it was rather than through the lenses of my fantasies, and I did not like it. My fantasies of being a writer, my fantasies that have kept me with Persis, my fantasies that have pulled me toward the entertainment industry…all fell away for a brief moment, a few hours before I lay down to put Burt to bed and fell asleep with him for twenty minutes…all my fantasies fell away, and I was just a lame, silly, fat man in a bad marriage taking care of a son I loved immensely, having told the world, all the people I love and trust and whose opinion I…good opinion I crave…that I was going to go off and write this screenplay… I had told them all about how much I was writing. And here I was, not writing, not even a writer, but a man who had a fantasy of being a writer, now facing going back to school to take up the common career of lawyering that I should have taken up to begin with had I not been so misled by my fantasies that arose as a result of my crashing into failure in the Ivy League, my pain, horror at accepting my social awkwardness, and my need to not become my dad.

All this deserves more, much more. But the time is up, and for once (well, I’ll give myself a break – not just once) for once, I should respect a boundary and stop.

Too much clutter. Who ever knew that bills could be so seductive, so distracting. There’s stuff all over my office floor, which if I hadn’t dragged all of the flarn (a term coined I think by Quinn to connote, denote (I forget the difference) rubbish and clutter in one’s life) on my… now I’ve forgotten the train… Anyway, my floor is like my mind. Too cluttered with stuff to function. My floor functions, I guess, but it’s…anyway. I wish I had more space in my head than I do.

So what’s next? There’s always this desperate…no, not always, sometimes it’s clear what I’m going to write, sometimes I don’t even think about it, but increasingly I worry about what I should start with, like I was saying the other day. What is the teaser? It’s like an episode of television. Here’s where you start, but…

What difference does it make? Like I was saying last week, or the week before, whatever.

I’m feeling pretty good today, not that that really matters. But it just means that I don’t have much to complain about. Though I’ll undoubtedly dig up something before our session is over.

Persis got back last night from a trip to DC. A long one. Tuesday to Saturday, and by the end of it I really felt like a dad, really got into the rhythm of things. This has happened before. Not that it means that I like being the sole parent, but in some ways it’s easier. Persis came home as I said (stupid me) (why do I hate repeating myself…? I am always afraid that… You know that indulgent intellectual or…discursive posture you get toward someone who is unknowingly telling you something that he has already told you, that kind of…you know, it’s really, like, when…and he does it all the time…[when] Charlie [Hah, I have done it! I actually used the pseudonym in the original. Censorship is infecting me!] tells me stories or details about his life or our mutual friends that he’s already told me, it actually hurts me. It’s like, if I was important enough to him to…if I was i--…as important to him as he is to me, he would remember what he tells me, even across the time and space. Motherfucker.) And so Burt and Persis and I went out for breakfast this morning, and all of a sudden it was like, “Does he need a coat, does he need a sippy cup or a fork?” Rha, rha, rha…and by that I mean that crow-like caw that has a glottal stop at the end of each syllable. When she is not here I do not need to ask these questions and delay myself. Everything just happens. Not quickly, but it does.

Neurontin, man. What a gift. I’m interrupting my flow of why I’m feeling so ok, why I’m feeling positively toward Persis, which is so rarely reported here…

But I mean, really…and I haven’t forgotten about Neurontin…who the fuck cares if I’m getting along with my wife? And I’m not saying this because--…although I have decided that I really need to stop involving her in this. I have not showed her any more, but I really am distressed by the fact that even just showing her the first two months has had such a constraining effect on my expression here. I mean, of what greater purpose can this…uh-oh, now I’m thinking metathoughts again, thoughts about this as a blog, instead of a conversation, jeremiad to you…it must happen; this is important. If this blog is to serve any higher purpose (listen to you you selfimportant little narcissistic turd), what greater purpose can it have than to reflect authentically the subjective experience of a marriage? I mean, and maybe it’s a bad marriage, maybe it’s not, we’ve been over this, but I really think more and more that the world, the social world – and maybe it’s sad vanity for me to articulate this as any sort of discovery – but the social world that we experience is the worst kind of lie: one that is designed to prevent people from coming in contact with each other in an authentic manner, and instead to represent ourselves as members of a social order in which a very narrow range of expressions are permitted. I mean, look: “How are you?” Everybody knows that that question is only rarely and at great peril to be answered in any way other than, “Fine.” And who do you do that with? With people with whom you are trying to break through the social barriers that we all voluntarily – Yes! Voluntarily! – erect around ourselves (Erect… Went to the zoo with Burt yesterday and there was this ape, a mandrill, that had this erection. And it was like, he was sitting, squatting back against a wall, looking at the swollen, red,…vermilion pudendum of his mate, and he had this like horizontal…must have been about 8 inches long (can you believe I was comparing my own endowment to that of an ape?) but rail thin. Not very attractive at all. I really wanted to stick around and see if he would fuck the chick, but we were on our way out, and what the hell would I have said to Burt (ah, the resistance to the imparting of information begins…arises out of an inability, a lack of desire to try to express that which one feels is outside of another’s ability to understand…)…anyway, erection. We erect these walls, we get married, we form the insular families, and then we develop (well, not all of us here, but many of those around us) this culture that is devoted to upholding, defending, making easier --- FUCK! I just took a sec to look at my watch, and I find that, again, I have pushed the wrong button on the stopwatch, and so I do not have a good indicator of how long our session has gone. This has been a tendency recently, and I wonder if it is not a desire actually to break down this particular wall of time between us. I mean, that’s a hard case to make since you are not actually bound by it, but maybe now that I can, now that I do not have to respect your fucking little, stupid, paltry and embarrassing to you because they show you to be a member of this class of minor minds that reinforce these stupid barriers that people…(I am typing very hard right now!)…and that I am taking advantage of this new freedom to expand beyond those walls, to show you that I don’t care anymore about your stupid rules, that I am above them, that I expand outside of them, that my erection is too big for your erection, that I am gaining weight and will, like I expanded out of the supposedly large oscar the grouch shirt that I bought for me at the children’s museum across the street from the zoo, that I am expanding outside of your barriers. I am better than them.)

I am better than marriage. And now I am typing very carefully, methodically. I am better than these strictures that the little people use. Instead of let them eat cake, I would say let them get married. Let them have kids.

I had a playdate with asian woman yesterday. She is… I’m reading this very cool book called The Surrender, which Reinhardt…throughout I have found myself tempted to use pseudonyms here in the original, to save myself the trouble of changing them later…referred me to (and for which she has earned my undying respect)…it’s about anal sex, how it is a transcendent sexual act, how it transformed the author. Anyway, she [the author, Toni Bentley…not Reinhardt or the asian woman] talks a lot about how…well, cunnilingus is put on a pedestal. And I would… I mean… I would really not mind it if I could go up to women and say, “Do [Would] you mind if I ate your pussy for you? I just want to watch you come and be on my way. No reciprocation necessary.” Would that be such a…

I mean, here perhaps is core of it. I want to have…no I don’t necessarily want to have sex with other women. I mean, that would be okay, but I don’t really need that. I get off perfectly well on my own, thank you. But I really like seeing women come. I just want to watch them, help them have an orgasm, and I want to do it from between their legs. And I don’t…Toni Bentley rags on men who simply desire to please rather than those who just love pussy… And I don’t really want to watch them come from any sense of obligation or subservience. I don’t really care that they enjoy it, though it gratifies me that they would… I would just like to participate… I just love…

What moment is more essentially antisocial that orgasm? I mean…and this is that scene in (oh god, I disgust myself) When Harry Met Sally, the ‘I’ll have what she’s having’ scene. The orgasm is the most remote, the most protected, the most…unmentionable…act, experience in “polite society.” And I want to knock all that down. I want to go where I am not allowed to go. Did I ever tell you that I have this fantasy that (and it excites me to be writing this…that’s a no-no, it is exhibitionism, but here we are, and I am thinking of it)…this fantasy that…and it began I think in school, grade school, and so I envision a room of people, sitting down. And I could ask a question in my head, say [for example], “Who here masturbates?” And all of the people who…and of course, I was only interested in the girls…masturbate would levitate, arise from their chairs, unembarrassed, even unaware, perhaps that I was asking the question, because I asked it in my head and simply had this power to make truth manifest in the levitation of another person. Who has public hair [Let me take this opportunity to discourse on the delicious proximity of the words ‘public’ and ‘pubic’, the tendency for them to represent each other in my subaccurate and subconscious typing. As a general matter, I think it a very interesting orthographic phenomenon that two things that socially couldn’t be more remote from each other are forced into such uncomfortable and inconvenient proximity in our language. I do not really think my substitution of one for the other here qualifies as a true parapraxis since my common substitution of ‘public’ for ‘pubic’ (and it never happens the other way around) is a result of the fact that I often type the first word and more rarely the second and that my fingers have as a result come to expect the presence of the ‘l’ despite what my head might intend for them to render. Though I am of course totally open to, and in fact welcome giddily, the interpretation that that substitution represents my desire, well documented in this session, that the pubic become public. The substitution occurred several times over the course of this session, but lest the joke get old, I will pay tribute to it here and correct the subsequent occurrences.]? Pubic hair was my big interest in junior high, and it still…like, I don’t understand what the appeal of these calvic (that was from the spanish word), bald-pubed women making these piglike faces and snorting is to porn audiences. I mean, I love pubic hair, seeing it, especially for the first time on a woman I like…I once wrote in a draft of a scene for a script that preceded the one that I’m working on now and which script I often think about returning to (assuming I don’t completely abandon creative writing before this script is done), and was…and Leo once read this and underlined it as… anyway, it’s like, for me, seeing pubic hair… and the…

Okay, a women’s pants are coming off. And there’s this endless moment as they edge down her belly toward the line of her pubic hair and at first, it’s like I want to preserve that moment of suspense indefinitely. And I have this (and let me assure you that I masturbated shortly before coming to write this, so I am not, like – hold on, must answer phone – so I am not horny, or not starved, anyway –

So the women has…is--

Goddammit you bitch…I’m trying to write!!! Persis is calling me…

Okay…


Don’t know why…It’s naked exhibitionism. But I want to tell this to you.

She is, and my head is below her waist, looking up at her. And she is edging her pants, jeans down (I remember the first time I went to New York City, walking by the porn theaters and seeing the ads, I had not yet seen a porn, and the sign of a man and a woman in the poster in casual clothes, he goring her mouth with his tongue and edging his hand down her pants…man, that was one of the formative moments of my life, seeing that poster. I have fantasized many times about that poster…though not recently.) And she edges her pants down, and she knows what her pubic hair means to me. It is confirmation of her…her sexuality, her plump ripeness, her… I imagine that having pubic hair, seeing one’s pubic hair for the first time is to recognize one’s genitals as sexual objects. And so to see pubic hair, the ontology of pubic hair…no, the epis--…oh fuck that…to know that a girl has pubic hair is also to know that she is a sexual being with new… I stop on that word… Pubic hair meant sexuality to me in grade school. I have always masturbated, as you know, so I guess there was no…I needed some symbol to recognize in other people, in girls, the same feelings that I had always had but was taught that I could not express in public (oh the stories I could tell you that my mom has related to me, telling me to stop masturbating outside--… I am exaggerating…wasn’t that extreme…but suffice it to say that my tendencies to arouse myself and talk about said arousal in public as a child needed some gentle restraint…and I know that it never was more than gentle but that the message got across, and that ever since I have been trying to create a forum for myself in which I could talk about these things, display these things. So knowing about pubic hair – oh, looking under the table at Tracy Green’s overflowing hairy pussy, hair splaying out from around the edges of her plain white underpants. That was one of the formative images of my sexual life – was equivalent to knowing about sexual desire in another for me. And for some reason, I have been frozen in time… There was a party, a Bar Mitzvah party, I think, at Jonathan Moss’s house. And at it, behind the tent where people, the very people, girls I was talking about were dancing, partying… Shauna…what’s her last name?…black, uh…forgot it…anyway, Shauna Blackgirl and I were talking…talking where perhaps in a movie we would have been making out, preternaturally exploring each other’s bodies. And what we were talking about was… I was going down the list in my mind of all the girls in my class (and other classes… all the girls I was interested in, anyway) and asking Shauna if they had had their periods or if they had had p--…if they had pubic hair. And I will never forget…this conversation excited me so much: FINALLY! A way to know about the existence of pubic hair in the girls I saw every day but could never know… but whose pudenda I could never know. How lopsided a situation this was for me.

And then I remember now a time when my mom was…or when…I don’t know if I heard the conversation itself, or heard the conversation related to me. But it was around the time Rachel was…what? 11, 12, 13?…and my mom was relating to someone that she [Rachel, of course] was starting to grow breasts. And then there was a comment, probably a casual but pleasantly surprised, or not surprised, but…impressed…drawn out, “Oh,” and then my mom added as an afterthought, “And pubic hair.” And the way she said it, the way…or the way I…anyway, the way it occurs in my memory, real or false, is that she says it with a little bit of a scrunch, a scrunch that says…almost as if a nun were to say it, a little scrunch that betrays not a whiff of excitement or sexuality, but even maybe a little disgust at the awkward burgeoning sexual maturity in who otherwise is a little girl and has no sexual feelings at all (this is my interpretation of the expression, not necessarily my estimation of the truth). It is a tone of belittling…it belittles Rachel for having the…what?…awkwardness to grow pubic hair…? ‘Pubic hair.’ Like ‘masturbation’, such an ugly word. What would I call it?… Well, before that: my mom. So here she was talking about pubic hair in about the most unsexual way she possibly could, in a way that endowed Rachel with no sexual feelings. And I really felt a disjuncture here: it was an experience of the idea, the words, the image of pubic hair on a girl that did not at the same time bring with it a connotation of sexual feelings. It was disappointing. Even a little disgusting. But what would I call pubic hair: bear with me. Angel’s locks. Slurp moss. Orgasm threads. Good fur. Lusc… Maybe “good fur.” Generic, yet positive. Soft. Suggestive of positive feeling. Why is the fur good? What would make it good?…

My clock suggests I should stop, and perhaps I am just off on a tangent here…

How to close, as I put on my shoes and prepare to exit your office, with my back to you… I love pubic hair, and I would be happy if women would just let me roll around in it for a bit and be on my way.

A first here. I am writing a second entry, session in two days just because I feel like it, because I have gone over what I wrote yesterday and decided that indeed I was dwelling on a very superficial level and have chosen to take the opportunity to write again and to correct the record hopefully and to take these ideas where they want to go, rather than reining them in and skitting over the surface.

So I feel a little selfconscious that this next session will in many ways be a long footnote to yesterday’s but on the other hand I feel like there were some important things about yesterday’s session that I did not bother to write, and that upon rereading, I was inclined to write in, fill in in the standard post facto…whatever the proper snooty latin term is…italics.

So let’s start (ugh, don’t like beginning this way)…with Bill.

The talk with him is something that made me feel very vulnerable and that I had a lot of trouble articulating …not just what I took from it…but there is this resistance, this desire not to talk to you about it, not to bring it up and to acknowledge how much it meant to me. I wanted as Bill was talking to me to cuddle up to him, cower in his arms and have him, who was speaking in this soft voice with great care, love, empathy, and I wanted to do what I did when champ the dog bit me when I tried to pull him away from his food. I went in to mom’s office (we were in the kitchen at the time of the bite, and when Bill came in to look at my hand I cried in his arms from fear, and I wanted to do that again on tuesday night (this again was in b&m’s kitchen in platte), only now I feel like I am too old to do that. That is something that I really regret about myself. Ever since Nana died (though that is not really true because I wept many times, and to Bill also, about the end of my relationship with anna)…dog, Bill, anna, cry, Nana. When Nana died I never cried, and it was a fact that mom remarked upon recently, and her remarking on that fact made me very uncomfortable (I have become very walled off from her in the last several years, afraid of letting her in, feeling like she is always trying to pick her slimy hands that way in to my deepest soul…and maybe that is largely because of my…of the difficulties between her and Persis, but there it is). Anyway, so in presenting that conversation to you, though I really wish (I – I finally admit now – was stoned when we had it, which meant that what he was able to penetr--- shit, I just noticed that the timer had not started. So, how much leeway do I give myself…perhaps I will do a really bold thing and just: STOP WHEN I FEEL LIKE IT! Oh my (cat poop, as Burt would say…[I am ]descending into gibberish only intelligible to a couple of people in Ecksville)…so I wanted to relate to you the specifics of the conversation, which I have not bothered to reconstruct in its entirety, and I feel like it could be one of those life changing conversations that I look back and say this is where I really stated to move in this direction. He was as much my father that night as he ever was, and I know both that he would love to hear that and that I would love to say that to him, but…but what is keeping me? The idea that if … wishing that my real dad had been that dad, that dad would be very hurt if he knew how I felt about Bill? Those are not necessarily distinct feelings, because I may be projecting the hurt that I feel at Dad never talked to me the way Bill did Tuesday back onto dad. But part of me is also hesitant to endow that conversation with as much significance as I would like to. Part of me wants to just say, “Well, that might have been an important conversation; but let’s wait and see and evaluate once all the chips have fallen.” I want partially to seize on it and say, “That’s it. You’ve convinced me. I’m changing my life and am going to law school because at the very least it is getting late in my life and I have always wanted to do it, and the writing is not happening and the longer it keeps not happening the ironically less important it will be for it to happen right now, whereas going to law school…it gets more and more…see, the ageism sort of works in writing’s benign favor. If I’m already not the…too old to be the next hot thing…it really doesn’t matter when I emerge onto the scene. There’s some pressure off, as long as I’m willing to accept that the shooting star thing is not going to happen to me. Whereas, it will in fact get harder and harder for me to make a career as a lawyer.

Anyway (that word again), I want to…part of me wants to launch myself into the hammock that Bill set out for me in that conversation… It was almost an invitation to change my life, to get real (said, again, very tenderly and lovingly), and part of me wants so take him up on that and be able to say, “What you said opened the door for me to change my life and I want to thank you for that.” And part of me, again, wants to wait and see. I’ve been doing a lot of that.

I really should be working on the screenplay. But instead I’m sorting out my life. Is that time well spent?






So other stuff from yesterday. I hesitate to go back and look at the entry, because I don’t want to be so…

Ah. On the subject of the fourth wall, so to speak. This is now a kind of written theater, right? I mean, I am writing to you as if you were there, but you are not, …even if you might possibly tune in at some point. But you are not there. This is a soliloquy, essentially, and I am doing it in front of an audience that I have committed to not acknowledging the presence of. But the problem is that I have set myself the task of being, essentially, as unbounded and honest as I would be if I were in your room with you, and the problem is that I might well have feelings about the denial of the audience. I might well have feelings about the fourth wall and need to address it with you. But in denying the existence of the fourth wall I have put myself up a different kind of wall, as it were, in that I have disallowed a certain kind of…certain topic of discourse in order to maintain a…not really an illusion, because I could I think talk to you about certain people or about the fourth wall without actually breaking the fourth wall, though it would be awkward…but I don’t want to go there because I am afraid that it is not really important. Or I believe that it is not really important. And I question that belief. Certainly, I would imagine that people who have taken to the time to check out my blog would be interested in something other than my feelings about the fact that I am supposed to be pretending that blog does not exist. And I am allowing this expectation of expectation – you see, my expectations of the expectations of an audience that I deny, that I willingly disbelieve in – to channel, to constrain my discourse. And in so doing, I am in fact subverting the precise purpose that I have set myself in starting the blog to begin with: to be honest and unbounded. So I guess I must apologize. I have finally created a fundamentally artificial and selfsubverting…climate…space…forum for the expression of the truth. Or rather, here I am, seeking to articulate truth, and in that search embracing the fundamental denial of it. Perhaps I should stop right now. All I can do is say that I promise (to you, Goldberg) that if anything feels really important to me to say to you about the fourth wall (like this paragraph) I will do so, but that besides that, I will attempt to restrict my obsession with it, or at least to let thoughts that would otherwise tend to breach that wall…to let those thoughts pass through and exist only in me…this is getting a little goofy.





And so back to yesterday…while I have this nagging need to …I should go turn on Burt’s monitor…

And so yesterday…




God, I’m so ashamed. I am going to turn back to the actual entry because I had some stuff that I really wanted to put out there and I didn’t want to wait another week until it had all blown over.






You’re gonna kill me, but I still haven’t articulated to my satisfaction, the problem that I am [creating by] refusing to tip my hat to the audience. Let’s see if I can get it out any more clearly.

1) I seek to articulate the truth.
2) I have chosen a format that seeks to imitate another format [i.e. therapy] in which I…, in which I believe that truth is more readily accessed. Or I should just say, “I have chosen a format that imitates another format that also tries to get at the truth.”
3) The essence of this second format, the property that makes it capable of accessing the truth, is its intimacy, its privacy.
4) I have chosen a first format that is not private to imitate a second format that is private.
5) Were I in the second format actually, I would be encouraged to share my feelings about the context of the conversation.
6) Although I can certainly spend time articulating my feelings about the context of the first format, to do so would be contrary to the purpose for which I desire to write at all: which is to share[, rather than simply to reflect upon the conditions of my writing.].
7) So there are a couple things that trouble me about the implications for accessing truth in this format.
8) Though I seek to--

You know what. Fuck this nonsense. I’m going [inclined] to cross all that shit out, and encourage you not to read it. I’m trying to get at this tension that I feel between the purported honesty of my speaking to you and the fact that I am setting a limit for myself. And that that really impugns the ability of any kind of discourse to access the truth that does not allow itself to openly question and modify its own rules, which is pretty much most discourse. And it also suggests that …because I am threatened by this idea that people would not be ‘interested’ in my thoughts, feelings about the limits of the form. I feel that people do not come to fora like this to examine the fora; they do so in order to transcend the limits of the fora and to instead engage in communication, even if one-way. So in a way, all communication that is not fundamentally about how the communicating is being done is an outright lie. Maybe that’s what I’m trying to say; and I’m sad that my search for truth has become from the outset a lie.





Back to yesterday. I’m sorry about that last rash of nonsense, and I imagine that if you were truly here, you would have stopped me, slapped me upside the head to get my needle repositioned…




Being a writer. It is funny… No, I’m, not going to start that way. It is not funny. It simply is. It simply is that I have never… I have always held inside myself a feeling that this mantle of ‘writer’ that I have taken on has been false, that I was playing a role. And that there are in fact many things that I do that I do not feel are assumed. In fact, much of the small-‘w’ writing that I do does come naturally. But being a capital-‘W’ Writer has always felt like a sham. And I wonder, before I consider where that assumed role came from, what I imagine a Writer does that a writer doesn’t. A writer is someone who happens to be writing; it is a description of a person engaged in an activity. A Writer is someone who, independent of the fact that he or she may engage in that activity, has impacted the world with the product of that activity, who has within him- or herself a certain essence: a noble, stylish, determinable quality that is bestowed by God and cannot be denied or assumed. Truman Capote was a writer. I am not a writer.

When did I want to become a writer?

That word has such awful weight for me. It smacks of pretension; and the trouble is that the stuff that I want to express when I do what a small-‘w’ writer does is the antithesis of pretension. As I am writing to you, I do not want to pretend at all. I want what I write to be true, to be essentially unwritten. And so in order for me to do what it is that I desire to do when I am small-‘w’ writing – to express the truth in me – I am denying, evading the thing that I represent to the world (in my mind’s eye) that I want to be.

Where did I get this image?








Thinking.








A writer is someone who is composed, self-contained. His gift lies within him (this is something that I was getting into with Bill on Tuesday, now that I remember it, and that I wanted to save for you or Reinhardt). A writer is always complete because he does not need anything in order to express his gift. (Bear with me here; this is just what I associate to. I am well aware that much of this is neither objectively true [n]or, [even] if it might [could] be, not unique to writing.) I really do see the symbolic posture of a writer as someone like …what’s his face in Capote, Philip Seymour Hoffman, standing with his chin high, a scarf around his neck, hands in pockets. Complete. And needing nothing.





A writer is complete in and of himself. A writer needs nothing but what he was born with to be who he is and to express his gift. A writer holds his head high and is dressed well and is indifferent to the rabble of the…booboisie…hoi polloi. A writer is above it all. The writer is necessary for the hoi polloi to know itself.




What a writer writes is important. A writer’s product is part of the fabric, the knowing and the understanding of history. Without the writer, there is no history.


I am not a writer unless what I am writing is part of the fabric of our understanding of history.




I would like to make money and to have people know who I am and to know me for being a writer. I do not want, in order to have that happen, to abandon what I think is the writer’s calling. I do not want to waste my time with irrelevancies.



All people who are paid to write feel themselves to be part of this larger process of the writer, and unless I am paid to do it, I am not part of that process. I imagine that screenwriters are very important people. That is how I feel about them, and that is why I want to become one and why I will feel worthless if I fail to do so.

(I’m …and Reinhardt would kill me for this. Please don’t think I’m so stupid as to believe all this. I’m just articulating the feeling.)



BUT WHERE DID THIS IMAGE COME FROM? I HAVE THE COURSE…it’s like it’s on the tip of my tongue, I feel it in my solar plexus…

















Thinking.


















It was something that I invented, or seized upon, to distinguish myself from other people. To justify the fact that I was scared to engage with them. Or at least that’s what one of its functions was. I imagined that by watching people, by standing aside and looking at them, I was justifying that fact that I could not engage with them.

I’m thinking of Hebrew school, of that party at the end of hebrew school that was so awfully painful for me, where I was someone I do not recognize as myself: outcast, ridiculed, awkward, disliked, made fun of. And conceiving myself as a writer in that situation, as one who was taking it all in and watching, was a way to avoid the pain of accepting that I simply was all those things that I didn’t want to be and that I didn’t recognize as qualities that I possessed…at least, it was not true of me in the other worlds in which I roamed…walked. I was liked, accepted, valued, even loved. And here I was…a silly awkward outcast who could not engage. I could go into all those feelings. I have not done so fully here, but I do not have time right now. Perhaps this is an alternative to analysis.

But so the idea that I was a Writer was a way to say, “No, I’m not really an awkward incompetent outcast. I am occupying this position for a reason; and if not intentionally, then at least for the sake of a higher goal: being a writer. To be a Writer I willingly tolerate this pain.” And to say, no, I am not a Writer, is to simply acknowledge that I am awkward. That I do not know how to engage with people in many situations. That…what’s the word that would most express me…that no one likes me, and that is why I walk through rooms of people I don’t know and feels desperately sad. Why I can‘t strike up conversations with people without them thinking that I am a loser, trying, in the case of women, to get in their pants (which is actually usually true, from a fantasy sense.) The idea that I am a Writer is what keeps me from confronting the simple reality of my social inadequacies, little worldly incompetencies.


So did it start in hebrew school?

I know that I was always very proud[, even as early as, like, second grade,] when a piece of mine would show up in The Talisman, the creative writing compendium that came out twice a year at Miramar. When my poems would show up, I would view that as a validation, proof that I was good.


But then I sense a lull. I kept a journal through my teens…and oddly it was that …it was when my journal started to wane that I began cultivating a sense of myself as a writer…that’s not said right. It was when…they happened together. That is, I never approached my journal with the idea that I would try to write it well, although there was a certain degree of conscious crafting to parts of it, and there were parts that I was proud to share, like telling about my losing my virginity…reading that to Sandra in my bedroom in Spain, and her responding positively to it. But I never engaged in it with any sense of doing it well. The fact that I was doing it was what was important, because I was making – and this is what was always present, as far as I can remember – I was making an historical record. I fantasized about my journals being dug up or published posthumously and establishing singlehandedly the standard by which later historians judged the experience of living in my era. It would be, by virtue of the existence of my journals, the Geller era. And once I started to try to Be A Writer, that all went away. All of a sudden I was trying to be a writer instead of …well, it’s not exactly accurate to link the two too closely but…

I look to other times when writing well, when My Writing, was something that I was proud of, that defined me.

The time…my Junior Seminar paper, which I got a B+ on, but which I subsequently got published in the Journal of Culture. I believed that to be good writing, and it got proved to be good writing (this is the feeling) over the implicit objections of my professor, my beloved professor Daniel Lamb, whose approval I so desperately sought (though the true desperation was an interior one) in college, and which I never got.

But I never got it… It’s not like I did everything I could to win him over.. I just wanted him to automatically love me and approve of me and what I did. He was whip smart, remote, someone who I experienced as an expert – he taught the first semester of the Cultural Studies foundation course, and I still remember his lecture about …


Mom just signed in on Skype…must go talk to her…

Happy New Year. I’m flubbed. That’s the word that comes to mind to describe the worn out flatrubbertire feeling I have right now. I feel like spent, deflated (not mood wise, for once, just physically). Maybe it was something in the duck pasta I ate last night. What do you care about that? Another touch just for…what?…literary sake, but it’s not even that. Fuck this. Let's start over.

I am writing to you.

I have to put aside those little cutesy asides I’ve been doing, acknowledging the possibility of an audience but at the same time indulging in the tension that that creates in my interface with you. All that has to disappear, and now I must make the decision to just be writing to you, even if it’s artificial. Because I can go on and on tipping my hat to anyone who might be listening, because that’s the nature of the form, and it’s also in the nature of the anxiety I might feel if we actually were conducting a therapy session in front of other people. The answer is simply to acknowledge, once and now, that those people might be there, and to forget them. Even if it means denying some thoughts that might enter into my head.

(I expect Persis to poke her head in at any moment. That chick (I wanted to write ‘bitch’, but… See, this is exactly the thing I can’t do, because it wastes so much time). That chick just needs to keep her mouth shut. Long story.)

Anyway, just you and me now. And [to] all of those people out there who are expecting to see the tension between public and private be articulated ad infinitum: You’ve come to the wrong place. You don’t exist anymore. It’s just me and Goldberg, and that’s the last thing I'll ever say to you.

---

I’m tired.


I wish that there was some way to reconcile the extreme feelings of…(Persis that bitch just interrupted me; about the neighbors coming over for dinner or not; I took such pleasure in not answering her. In taking the exact amount of time that it would have taken to answer her question to tell her that I would not answer her question until later. I hope it frustrated her in the same way that she frustrates me in not letting me have the peace and quiet that I want…even to write a letter to my therapist. I could have just answered her. I know I’m still in ()’s. I…We’ve been getting along much better since we came back from Platte. Until today, yesterday, when the old foul mood set in again. I feel sorry for her. She never bargained on ending up with someone as sour to the institutions on which she placed the burden of her self worth. We should have recognized this about each other and gone our separate ways. I had a dream last night that I was at the point of proposing or not and that I wanted to break up with her but just didn’t have the guts. Then I also had a dream (that may have been attached to the s--…to this last one…a dream that I was sucked up into a tornado and cast up over the eye, 200 miles into the air and the tornado was two tornados in…joining…coming together…joining into a figure eight…or perhaps an infinity sign and that between the violence of the two of them I was liberated, cast out over the landscape far below and left to drift down…this with the sense that I was being rescued from certain death in the tornado, although as Burt woke me up (too soon, and perhaps that’s the reason [for my sluggishness] – I didn’t end up falling asleep until about three am and I awoke at a quarter after seven)…as Burt woke me up I wondered (still in the dream) how the hell I thought I was going to get myself out of the fix that was supposedly going to save my life.)

Anyway, what was I saying? I’m tired. And this [is] related to the Persis stuff, too… I wish I could reconcile the extremes of feeling I have about my life. On the one hand, as I have told you or communicated to you over and over, I hate it. I hate getting up in the morning. I hate the tedium of childcare. I hate the stupid uselessness of being married. But being around Burt is like this separate island of pure magic in the midst of this sewer. That’s what it is; it’s like a bar of gold, if you can imagine that, floating down a river of shit. And it is the shit, the density of the shit that enables the bullion to float, to be there, the joy, the gold, emergent from the shit rather than being consumed by it. The gold needs the shit to be seen at all. But it is a sewer nonetheless. Looking at Burt, playing with him, interacting with him is pure joy. But it exists in the context of this awful swill of a life that I wish I did not have to endure and cannot wait to get out of, and which I see the phases of childrearing as being connected…I feel like my being in the swill is related to how old Burt is. Maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s just swill from here on in, with nothing to enjoy but Burt, this island amid the muck.

So I was saying that Persis didn’t bargain on this. I was starting to say that everything…and just now I’m starting to feel like this is too much narrative…maybe I should be digging deeper, though I’m waiting for something…I don’t really have a problem to solve right now. I was going to say that I’m waiting for something to arise from the fabric of this confession, this jeremiad, that is suitable for…that passes as a therapeutic insight. But…what?


Anyway, Persis didn’t deserve this. She didn’t deserve to marry someone who would turn out to be a chronic depressive opposed to the very… or at least at odds (if that doesn’t mean the same thing) with the very life style to which she most desperately aspired. I wish I weren’t married. I wish I had Burt and had childcare and could come see him whenever I wanted but basically had my life to write and to pursue (with a daring that I have never ever possessed) women to have meaningful sex with for a while, and then to part from without rancor. I don’t like being married, and I think the fact that there is a movement (as I learned yesterday) afoot to oppose marriage (I mean an actual movement, a group, a nonprofit whose mission is to oppose marriage)…and…

This feels like a waste of space. I am feeling very down on this format right now. What use is it really? You’re not really there. I am keeping this up as a farce, as a gesture to people who do not really care about me, as an arbitrary… out of some desire to communicate my experience of my life and yet to have it stand out from among those other blogs that are just one little child incident after another. All of those stupid concatenations of meaningless activity and…physical and mental…that pass for meaningful… I mean, all of the people who ‘blog’ must have this same desire, this same illusion that the little pieces of their lives actually mean anything to anyone. Why else would they bother? I mean, I’ve looked at blogs and see some that talk about just wanting to share themselves – this is the authors talking here – share themselves with their friends, as a way of communicating…I don’t know. I mean, how, really, does this paltry effort contrast with those? Who really cares about my lame ambivalence, my too bad regrets at how my bourgeois life has unfolded so far. I mean, looking at the history of mankind, what is more pitiful and futile and irrelevant than one guy who thinks he’s so fucking smart blabbing…not even blabbing – too much energy behind it – dribbling his poor little woes to a world that he hopes will care. What a sham.










So what does one write after that?








Last Tuesday I had a good… we, Bill and I had a long conversation on the topic of whether…at least, this is where it started…about the issue of my feeling supported by anyone, Persis in particular, but anyone in general, and he was…I mean, I don’t like to be hyperbolic, but he had a lot to say that was very helpful. Or at least valuable. I realize that my expectation of perfect faith in abilities and success that I even do not have faith in…expecting that perfect faith from people around me is unreasonable, an…a childish ideal. (And incidentally that it is remarkably similar to the complaint that Persis always had of me, that I do not really support her. I realize[, in fact,] that I do not really support her. Though I have known that myself for a long time; it has just been that I have not wanted to admit it to Persis. But the issue has been that…well, specifically when she asks me if I think she was reasonable or right to have responded in a particular way, say, in a conflict between her and a friend. I consistently maintain that that is not a call that I can make, that I was not there, etc., that I can only respond from my perspective on what she is saying.

(I am dreading the dinner party that Persis has managed to schedule tonight. I feel like I could fall asleep right now and not wake up until tomorrow morning.)

Anyway, so I realized that her expectation of perfect and undying support is unreasonable, as mine is, but I also realize that I have held out the same expectation or need of support from those close to me and that it is really not fair to them to demand that they be the ones to dissipate the subconscious doubts that I have about myself.

But Bill went on to talk about the first time a patient of his committed suicide and how he was too identified with this work in the sense that the suicide brought on a sense of personal failure that was out of all proportion to…well, just that he had so identified his self with his work that in his failure to help a patient he saw the failure of himself as a person, and that that was something that he only overcame about a decade later, and now he has written a paper on …on which he alternately speaks from a first-person subjective and a third-person analytical perspective on his experience.

Anyway, (and I’m starting to get tired of my use of ‘anyway’) the point was that I am so personally identified with my writing that I am going down a troubling road when I say things like I did last Tuesday, things like how I see my writing as inseparable from myself, that when the writing is at its best is when there is no difference, and that that is one of the differences between the writing that…

Well, it was a tough set of things for me to hear, because I basically walked away feeling…what?…unsupported. (I’m too tired to be doing this now.) On the one hand I felt like I understood the difficulties…I’m just blabbing here; I really need to get back to…








What did I take away from my talk with Bill?

1) I am heavily identified with being a writer. Self-identified. Not in the ‘self identified’ as, like, a vegetarian; but like I have conflated my self-image with my professional image, and that that is a very dangerous thing to have happen from a psychological perspective.
2) Mom and Bill are worried about me and they do not really believe…in the sense that they are not personally convinced that I will succeed as a writer.
3) That…and I’m not proceeding from a rational perspective here; I’m just saying how I felt after this talk…the only sensible, healthy option for me is either to dis…to detach myself from my self image as a writer… well, that I feel that the alternative to that [being overidentified with my profession] is to not care very much about what I do.

See, and this is a point that bears some discussion…‘discussion’…ugh…I often hear Bill talk about his practice in a way that makes me feel like he is more detached than I would like to be in my work. And I think about editing…I got pretty attached to some of it…but [insofar as it was work product that I didn’t feel personally invested in,] it was also work that I found ultimately unsatisfying… It feels like that in order to enjoy, to really value, and feel like the work that I do is important, that I have to, on some level, identify myself with the work. The alternative feels very bland to me. It feels like the only alternative to being one’s craft is to work on something…to spend one’s life doing something that is alien to oneself. And of course I think about the hard row that writers in film hoe, and that I probably would not enjoy it so much after a while, and though I would like maybe the prestige and the money, writing things that I didn’t really care about would be really sucky, and would end me up where I was when I left All Hands: disillusioned about…and I mean ‘disillusioned’ in a very literal sense…I have had these illusions about how the entertainment industry has functioned, what I had to give to it, and growing up has been in large part about realizing that those illusions were products [narcissistic fantasies of] a lame tyro, a weak and youngminded…simpleminded youth. The industry is very little of what I would like it to be about. Most of it anyway.

And so I find myself faced again with law school, which I do feel passionate about, but which is more of a meritocracy, insofar as being…there being a more…a less tenuous relationship between talent and success. But it’s law school.

And yet I am starting to feel that I will not have done everything I have wanted to do until I have gone to law school, and that for that reason I perhaps should get my butt in gear and….

(eyes closing, falling asleep, ‘bell’ has rung…‘bell,’ because I don’t have the watch with me)

…and go already, so at least I can get that lingering longing extinguished and get on with my life, as a lawyer or not.

But this idea that I might actually enjoy the vagaries of screenwriting is expecting and encouraging. [I really was falling asleep here; I have no idea what I was trying to say with this sentence.]

Fuck this. It’s time to stop, and I’m just…