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?