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.