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…