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…